creation

THE INTRODUCTION: CONTAINING THE COSMOGONY, OR CREATION OF THE WORLD.

Our design is to write a General History of mankind, from their original descent to our own time. This is an undertaking of vast extent, which would perhaps be scarcely practicable if the histories of all nations were now extant and their series complete. But many nations entirely neglected their history, at least for several ages. The histories of many others, who kept some records of past actions, have been either totally or in part destroyed by wars, time, misguided zeal, and other casualties. Besides, few nations have been able to give a tolerable account of their original or early antiquities. The first memory of persons and facts was preserved by the institution of festivals, the building of cities, the erecting of stones, pillars, altars, tombs, and similar monuments, from which a true series of history could not be accurately deduced and collected, any more than from the oral tradition that accompanied them.

But if the want of records has, on one hand, reduced history into a closer compass, it has, on the other, occasioned great confusion and uncertainty. The frequent interruptions and defects that occur in the antiquities of nations drive the historian so often to precarious conjectures and oblige him to have recourse to so many shifts to connect and supply them. His labor seems to be increased by the scarcity of materials, and he is unable, after all, to give his reader satisfaction.

Many other difficulties attend the execution of this undertaking, especially regarding the history of ancient times. These include the numbers of forged and spurious books; the fictions of poets, who were the first historians; the contradictions and partiality of authors; the different computations of time in use among the same as well as different nations; the want of eras to compute from in some nations and the multiplicity of them in others; and the variety of proper names for the same person and place, and their corruption through ignorance, negligence, or design. What adds to the misfortune is that, if we except the Jews, not one of the histories of those ancient nations whom the Grecians called Barbarians, written by the natives or extracted immediately from their records, has come to our hands. Nothing remains of them besides some few fragments preserved here and there in other writers, which serve only to make us lament their loss and to show the inaccuracy of the Greek historians with regard to foreign nations.

We have thought it proper to briefly premise this much regarding the state of ancient history, in order to entitle ourselves to the reader’s candor in passing judgment upon a performance wherein there are so many difficulties to struggle with. But before we enter upon the history itself, we shall give some account of the cosmogony, or the production and formation of this earth. This seems to demand our first attention, as it is the place from whence mankind derive their original and the theater whereon the scenes of the ensuing history are to be acted.

God, the Author of the World

That the universe was created or produced out of nothing by an infinitely powerful, wise, and good God—who, being self-existent, is the original cause of all things—is not only certain from revelation but is also deducible and has been clearly proved from reason. And though all atheists, both ancient and modern, have constantly denied that even infinite power can create matter, and the affirmative has been thought to be embarrassed with several considerable difficulties (such as our having no idea how something that was nothing for all eternity can be made to exist, and the seeming contradiction in supposing the world to be created in time, because then it would be separated from eternity only by an indivisible point, which cannot sufficiently distinguish an eternal Being from a temporary production), yet these are rather difficulties arising from our own imperfect and finite reason and conception, whereby we are unable to form a distinct idea of creation or eternity, than any real impossibility in the thing itself.

For it is no contradiction to affirm that something which once was not may since have begun to exist. The true notion of creation is not forming something out of nothing as if it were a material cause, but rather bringing something into being that previously had no being at all and which, without some cause, would not have existed. This no man can reduce to a contradiction, any more than the formation of anything into a shape which it had not before can be reduced to a contradiction. And those who deny God’s power to create matter must resort to one of these suppositions: either that matter existed from eternity as a passive subject of all the operations of God and as a collateral principle, or else that matter is the only self-existent being. Either of these involves us in the most impious absurdities. The first supposition necessarily implies two self-existent principles, which is a direct contradiction. The other implies that it is impossible to conceive of matter not being, or being in any respect otherwise than it now is, without a contradiction, than which nothing is more easy. For whether we consider the form of the world, with the disposition and motion of its parts, or whether we consider the matter of it as such, without respect to its present form, everything in it—both the whole and every one of its parts, their situation and motion, the form, and also the matter—are the most arbitrary and dependent things, and the farthest removed from necessity, that can possibly be imagined.

As for those who deny the actual existence of matter and motion (if there are any who do so in earnest), it might be sufficient to say that there is in effect no difference in respect to us whether they are actually existent or no more than appearances. For if God immediately communicates all sensible perceptions to our mind, as he must do if there is no such thing as sensible substance, he is still the author of those appearances, which have the same consequences and effects, to our conception, as if they were real, not to mention the indecency of suspecting God to have made the world a mere scene of delusion. The impossibility of extension is attempted to be proved from the inextricable difficulties that follow if matter is infinitely divisible, as it necessarily must be and is easily demonstrated. And if there is no extension, the unavoidable consequence is that there can be no motion, which is also argued from the perplexing objections raised on the supposition of a vacuum. And yet a vacuum must be admitted, or else no motion can be conceived. But these difficulties, though unanswerable as great masters of reason have confessed, prove no more than that human understanding is finite and imperfect. Being only raised from our want of having an adequate idea of either extension or space, they ought not therefore to be esteemed real difficulties.

The Several Opinions Concerning the Origin of the World

The several opinions which have been held by the ancients or moderns as to the origin of the universe may be comprehended under one or other of the following three:

1. That the world is eternal, both as to matter and form, and had neither any origin nor will be subject to any corruption.
2. That the matter of the world is eternal, but not the form.
3. That the world had a beginning and will suffer a dissolution, being of its own nature perishable.

To begin with the first of these opinions: None of the ancients openly maintained it, except some pseudo-Pythagoreans and Aristotle, to whom we may add several of Plato’s followers. But few, if any, of them intended thereby to assert, as some moderns have done, that the material world was God, or the original, self-existing, and independent Being, in opposition to the belief of a supreme, all-governing Mind. They meant either that something must needs be eternal (which is all Ocellus Lucanus proves), or else that the world is an eternal and necessary effect flowing from the immutable energy of the divine nature (which seems to have been Aristotle’s opinion), or else that the world is an eternal voluntary emanation from the all-wise and supreme Cause (which was the opinion of many Platonists).

Ocellus Lucanus and Aristotle on the World's Eternity

Ocellus Lucanus, whose antiquity and authority have been opposed to those of Moses, though he lived not long before Plato, was one of the most ancient asserters of the world’s eternity, wherein he deviated from the true doctrine of his master Pythagoras. We have a short treatise under his name concerning the nature of the universe, wherein he affirms it to be utterly incapable of either generation or corruption, of beginning or end. He states that it is of itself eternal, perfect, and permanent forever; and that the frame and parts of the world must needs be eternal, as well as the substance and matter of the whole, and mankind also. But his arguments for this opinion are either very absurd and ridiculous—as when he attempts to prove that the world must be eternal, without beginning or end, because both its figure and motion are circular and therefore without beginning or ending—or else they are arguments that tend to prove that something must needs be eternal because it is impossible for everything to arise out of nothing or to fall into nothing. For example, he says that the world must have been eternal because it is a contradiction for the universe to have had a beginning; since, if it had a beginning, it must have been caused by some other thing, and then it is not the universe. All he says in his whole book is plainly reducible to this one argument.

To say the truth, he himself seems persuaded that however eternal and necessary every thing in the world is imagined to be, yet even that necessity must flow from an eternal and intelligent Mind, the necessary perfections of whose nature are the cause of that harmony which keeps the universe together and prevents its falling into disorder. He allows God to have given men faculties, organs of sense, and appetites, not for the sake of pleasure, but fitted for final causes. He expressly asserts that the ever-active Being governs, and the ever-passive is governed; that the one is first in power, the other posterior; that the one is divine, rational, and intelligent, and the other generated, irrational, and liable to change.

Aristotle also held this opinion, as is sufficiently known, and, if he is to be believed, was the first, at least of the Greeks, who asserted it. He says that before his time, the temporary production of the world was universally entertained, though it was a question whether it should ever perish or not. His doctrine was that not only the matter of the heavens and earth were ungenerated and eternal, but that even mankind and all the species of animals, male and female, have subsisted from everlasting by a perpetual course of generation, without any original beginning or production. He believed that the earth has forever been adorned with trees, plants, flowers, minerals, and other productions, as we now see it to be. But how this is reconcilable with what he elsewhere delivers of the natural gravity and levity of different elements seems hard to show. For if those elements were ever in their natural places and dispositions, according to their respective gravity, which nothing but some external violence could have hindered, it follows necessarily that the earth was once in a very different form from what it now is and could not possibly be inhabited from eternity.

The great reason which induced Aristotle to assert the world to be eternal was because he thought such an effect must needs eternally proceed from such an eternal cause as the divine Mind, which, being all act and energy, could not rest in a state of inactivity. He acknowledges that the first principle is neither fire, earth, nor water, nor anything which is the object of sense, but that a spiritual substance is the cause of the universe and the source of all the order and beauty, as well as of the motions and forms, which we so much admire in it. And he expressly describes God to be an intelligent Being, incorporeal, the first mover of all things, himself immovable, eternal, indivisible, and void of all quantity. He affirms that if there were nothing but matter in the world, there would be no original cause but an infinite progression of causes, which is absurd. So the true notion of this great philosopher was that though the world had no temporary generation, yet it was produced from one supreme Deity in some other manner.

These sentiments of Aristotle as to the eternity of the world have been embraced by many of his followers, and among the rest by several learned Mohammedans, who were thence named Dahris, or Eternalists. Of this opinion, al-Farabi, al-Kindi, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) were suspected. Therefore, their philosophy was publicly, and even in the pulpit, inveighed against by the more orthodox, and they themselves were branded with the invidious appellations of atheists and infidels.

Plato's Followers and the World's Eternity

Though Plato, as we shall see hereafter, plainly acknowledged the world to be made by God, yet having used some expressions as if he thought the time of its formation to be indefinite—as when he says that the world must be an eternal resemblance of the eternal idea—his followers, or the greatest part of them who adhered to Aristotle’s opinion in this matter, took advantage of these expressions. They understood a creation not in time, but only in order of nature, causality, and dependence. Existence from eternity and being caused or produced by another were not therefore apprehended by these philosophers to be contradictory or inconsistent. And as they were led into this opinion no other way than from the sole consideration of the deity—namely, its benevolent will and generative power—so they allowed that the world, notwithstanding its being from eternity, might in some sense be said to be made, as being produced from another cause and not self-originated. And the generation of the inferior gods and the world in this sense, Proclus himself, that grand champion for the world’s eternity, plainly acknowledges when he says that they called it the true generation of the gods, meaning thereby not any temporary production but their ineffable procession from a superior first cause.

The later Platonists were so fond of this notion of the world’s eternity that, being on one hand unwilling to abandon it and on the other desirous to save appearances, they endeavored by forced constructions to wrest their master’s words, especially his Timaeus, to their purpose. As has been long since observed, they turned themselves every way, using all manner of violence to the text, as conceiving they ought by all possible means to conceal and deny the generation of the world and of its soul, as if it were some horrid thing and not to be spoken of. It is well known that Platonism was very early introduced into the church, and even this dogma was favorably received by some, Origen in particular, and as zealously opposed by others. It may however be worth observing that this doctrine of the world’s co-eternity with God was, in the sixth century, suffered to be publicly taught in Alexandria by Ammonius, the scholar of Proclus, and not without success.

Arguments for the World's Eternity Considered

To the argument made use of by the Platonists for the eternity of the world, drawn from the nature and attributes of God, it has been answered that though God is essentially and necessarily good, yet the communications of his goodness are the effects of his will and not merely of his nature. For God, being a free agent, could have refrained from making the world, or could have made it otherwise. Therefore, those who make the expressions of the divine bounty necessary, in order to settle the world’s eternity, and that he might always have an object whereon to exercise his goodness, take as much from his self-sufficiency as they would seem to flatter his goodness. For God cannot be himself without his goodness; and therefore, if his goodness cannot be without some creature to show and display itself upon, God cannot be perfect or happy without his creatures. Because these are the necessary issues of his goodness, and consequently the being of the creature becomes necessary to the being of God, which is the highest derogation imaginable from the absolute perfection of the divine nature.

All which is very true, and we do not see what reply a Platonist could make if it were the real doctrine of the sect that the world was an involuntary effect of his mere nature. But they plainly taught otherwise and expressly declared that one of the reasons why they maintained the world not to be a temporary production was the consideration of his beneficent will as well as his productive power; both which being supposed, the effect may necessarily follow without any derogation from God’s absolute perfections.

It is not therefore without due consideration that very able disputants have acknowledged that the time when the world was created, or whether its Creation was, properly speaking, in time, is not so easy to demonstrate strictly by bare reason, but the proof of it can be taken only from revelation. Therefore, they who, wanting that light, have denied the world to have had a beginning are somewhat excusable.

But, on a nicer discussion, this controversy about the eternity of the world will appear to be, in a great measure, a dispute about words only. All Christians in general (except those who believe the eternity of matter and therefore deserve not that name) agree that God alone has always existed. But several maintain that he might have actually created the world as soon as he formed the decree of producing it, whence they conclude that the world might have existed eternally, since there is no doubt that the decree to produce it is eternal. On the other hand, several maintain that it is impossible for a creature to be eternal. But when they come to argue, the strength of each party lies rather in making objections than solving them. This dispute, which is rendered so tedious and perplexing, would end presently if they would but explain themselves clearly on each side and forego the equivocal acceptation of eternity. Then the question should be thus stated: Is it possible that God and his creatures may have always existed together? The negative would not so readily be taken, for the expression of the eternity of the world—that expression which shocks so many people—would not strike the mind. To remove this stumbling-block still more effectually, it should be declared that a creature which should have always co-existed with God would not be eternal for this reason: because the duration of creatures is successive, and that eternity is a simple duration, which essentially excludes both past and future. By this essential distinction between the duration of God and that of creatures, the whole contest would almost cease, and each side would find their account. It would be granted to those who deny the possibility of the creature’s being eternal that they are in the right; and it would not be denied to be possible that God and his creature might have always existed together, since it is certain that the cause includes not in its idea a priority of time with respect to its effect, and that this is more nicely true as to an almighty cause, which needs only will to produce actually whatever it pleases. Again, they who say that the creatures have not always co-existed with God must grant that God existed before they did. There was then a before when God existed alone; therefore it is not true that God’s duration is an indivisible point, whence it follows that time preceded the existence of creatures. These consequences drive those who argue in this manner to contradict themselves, for if the duration of God is indivisible, without past or future, time and creatures must have begun together. And if so, how can it be said that God existed before the existence of his creatures?

The two seemingly insuperable arguments then for the eternity of the world are drawn from the eternity of God’s decree for its creation and the indivisibility of the real duration of God. These have yet been answered in this manner: It is supposed that among the possible beings which God knew before he made the decrees of creation, one was a successive duration which has neither beginning nor end, and whose parts are as distinct from one another as those of possible extension, which God likewise knew before his decrees as infinite according to the three dimensions. He has left in the state of possible things one part of this infinite duration and has decreed the existence of the other. He chose such a moment as he pleased in this ideal duration for the first which should exist and annexed thereto the act by which he decreed the creation of the world. So that the eternity of that act does not prove the eternity of the world, nor does the indivisibility of God’s real duration prove the world had no beginning.

But after all, the distinction of the schoolmen between the manner of the duration of God and that of his creatures, whereon the preceding argumentation is built, though it has been generally received by the best pagan as well as Christian philosophers and is at least as old as Parmenides, has yet been rejected and opposed by many men of great learning and judgment as inconsistent and unintelligible. It is very hard to conceive eternity to be an instant, or how that can be together or at once which must necessarily be imagined to be co-existent to successions. And whatever force the above-mentioned arguments may be supposed to carry for the eternity of the world, understanding thereby the universe with its several changes and vicissitudes, they are far from proving that the disposition of the solar system, much less the form of the earth, has been for ever the same as we now see it. The imagining of which seems to have been the great error of the old Eternalists and has been strongly opposed by several arguments, as well from reason as human testimony, separate from the evidence of divine revelation, as will be seen hereafter.

Those Who Held the Universe to be God

Some modern asserters of the world’s eternity have gone on very different principles from these ancients and ventured to affirm the material universe to be self-existent and the supreme Deity itself. This is the doctrine of Spinoza, the first, as is supposed, who reduced atheism into a system by regular deductions, after the method of the mathematicians. But as the fundamental opinion whereon he erected that system was not new, it may be proper, before we speak of him, to say something of those who led him the way, though he has departed from them in some respects.

That the universe is but one substance, and that God and the world are but one and the same thing, has been an opinion of some standing and is supposed to have been first taught by Xenophanes, the founder of the sect afterwards called the Eleatic. He is said to have held not only the eternity and immutability of the world, but also that whatever existed was one being; that there was neither any generation nor corruption; that this one being was immovable and remained always the same, and was the true God. This doctrine was not only defended by his successors Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno of Elea, but by Stilpo and the Megaric philosophers also. And to obviate the objection which might be brought against the unchangeable nature of the universe from the continual alterations made therein by new generations and corruptions, they maintained that whatever changes it seemed to suffer were no more than illusions of our senses and mere appearances. They are easily beaten from this last retreat, for since they cannot deny that there are changes in the world in appearance at least, it even thence follows that nature is not immutable, but must necessarily be changed in the subject which produces or receives our sensations. And those sensations, being passions, imply both an efficient cause and a passive principle, which overthrows at once their pretended unity of all things.

Nevertheless, this opinion of Xenophanes and his followers, that all things are one, which seems so impious and absurd, has been so explained by several learned men, and they themselves defended, as if by the universe or all, they meant not the material principle of which all things are composed, but that one simple principle from whence all things had their original, that is, the true God, whom they expressly affirm to be incorporeal and therefore could not possibly be in their opinion the material world. But the writings of these philosophers being not without obscurity, some of the ancients who were less acquainted with metaphysical speculations understood them physically, as if they had asserted the whole corporeal world to be all but one thing and that immovable, thereby destroying, together with the diversity of things, all motion, mutation, and action, which was plainly to make them not to have been philosophers, but madmen. Simplicius, a man well acquainted with the opinions of ancient philosophers, assures us that Xenophanes and Parmenides herein wrote not as naturalists, but as metaphysicians; not concerning a physical element or principle, but concerning the true Being, or the divine transcendency. He adds that though some of those ancient philosophers did not distinguish natural things from supernatural, yet the Pythagoreans, and Xenophanes, and Parmenides, and Empedocles, and Anaxagoras did all handle these two distinctly, however, by reason of their obscurity, it was not perceived by many, for which cause they have been most of them misrepresented, not only by pagans but also by Christians.

And in fact, when these Eleatics come to treat of natural things, they plainly acknowledge them to be compounded of different principles. Xenophanes supposed that the earth consisted of air and fire, and that all things were produced out of the earth, and the sun and stars out of clouds; he also held that there were four elements. Parmenides made a professed distinction between the doctrine concerning theological and metaphysical things, called by him truth, and that concerning physical and corporeal things, which he called opinion. In the former of which doctrines he asserted one immovable principle, but in the latter two movable ones, fire and earth, or heat and cold, the first being the workman, and the other the matter. He taught that the earth was formed of a denser air which subsided, and that mankind was first produced out of mud. These notions concerning the origin of things he seems to have received from Archelaus the Ionic, whose auditor he is said to have been. And with them Zeno also agreed, holding that the nature of all things arose from a mixture of heat and cold, dryness and moisture, and that man was generated of the earth, being equally compounded of the aforesaid principles so that neither predominated.

Whether Strato of Lampsacus held the unity of all things or not is a doubt; for though he made nature inanimate and acknowledged no God but nature, yet it is not certain that he taught the universe, or nature, to be one simple being. From his ridiculing the atoms of Democritus, it has been thought reasonable to imagine that he admitted no difference between the parts of the universe, but this is allowed to be no necessary consequence. It may be only concluded that his opinion approaches infinitely nearer to Spinozism than the corpuscular system. There is likewise some room to believe that he did not teach, as the Atomists did, that the world was a new work and produced by chance, but, as the Spinozists do, that nature produced it necessarily and from all eternity. Plutarch indeed tells us that he held that which was natural to follow that which was fortuitous, as if he allowed something to chance at first motion or impression at least, which was afterwards perfected by nature, or the plastic life supposed by him to be in every part of matter, making the mundane system to depend upon a certain mixture of chance and plastic or orderly nature, both together. But as his opinion is represented by Lactantius, he rejected all chance, which was the great difference between him and the Epicureans, and affirmed that nature had in itself a generative and vital power, but had neither sense nor figure; so that all things were, as he imagined, generated of their own accord, without the assistance of any Former or author.

But whatever was the real notion of this greatest of the Peripatetic philosophers, it is certain that Alexander the Epicurean, who is supposed to have been contemporary with Plutarch, maintained that God is matter, or not distinct from it; that all things are essentially God, and that forms are imaginary accidents which have no real existence; and therefore he held all things to be substantially the same. Some heretical Christians have also embraced this extravagant opinion, as one Amalric in particular, whose dead body was taken up and burnt in the beginning of the thirteenth century for having in his lifetime taught that all things were God, and God was all things, and the essence of all creatures, so that the creator and the creature were the same; and that God was therefore called the end of all things because all returned into him. His sentiments were followed by his scholar David of Dinant and several others; the learned Peter Abelard has also been accused of holding the same opinion.

This notion has not been confined to Europe only; it has also made no small progress in the East. A considerable sect among the Japanese teach that there is but one principle of all things; that this principle is simple, clear, luminous, incapable of increase or diminution, without figure, perfect in the highest degree, wise, but void of reason or understanding, leading a life of perfect inaction, ease, and tranquility, like a man whose attention is strongly fixed on one thing, regardless of all other. They hold that this principle is in all particular beings and communicates its essence to them in such a manner that they are the same thing with him and are resolved into him when they are destroyed. The sect called by the Mohammedans al-Zindika (the singular of which is Zindik) do also maintain that whatsoever we see or is in the world is God. And the famous Abu Muslim, by whose conduct and success the Khalifate was translated from the family of Umayya to that of Abbas, is said to have held the same opinion, and that all things returned at last into one common principle, or God. This opinion some have supposed to be what the Rabbinic authors call the Metempsychosis of resolution, and differs little, if any thing, from that of a later sect who sprang up among the Mohammedans about 300 years ago and call themselves Ahli Tahqiq, or people of certainty. They believe that there is no other God than the four elements, which, together with the world and all its changes and vicissitudes, they assert to be eternal; and that mankind, as well as other beings, are a compound of those elements, of which they are formed, and into which they return and are dissipated. Of this sect there are great numbers in the province of Lar in Persia.

The Soul of the World and Spinoza

The dogma of the soul of the world, which is not only common at this time in the East but was so among the ancients and made the chief part of the Stoic system, is at the bottom the same with that of Spinoza. But as he differed from the Stoics, not only in contracting God’s knowledge (which they allowed to be universal) and in denying his providence, but also in asserting the present disposition of the world to have been necessary and eternal and consequently subject to no decay, contrary to their express doctrine, it will be more proper to consider that opinion under the next head. We shall only observe here that some heterodox Stoics, Boethus in particular, did not only deny the world to be an animal or intelligent being, substituting in the room of its mind or soul a plastic nature, but also asserted the world’s eternity and incorruptibility, or one constant and invariable course or tenor of things. The elder Pliny seems also to have been of this opinion, for he declares that the world, and that which by another name is called heaven, by whose circular motion all things are governed, ought to be believed to be an eternal and immense deity, such as was neither made nor shall ever be destroyed.

Spinoza taught that there is no difference of substances, but that the whole and every part of the material world is a necessarily existent being, and consequently infinite. He taught that there is no other God but the universe, and that extension is one of his attributes. He taught that since it is absolutely impossible for anything to be created or produced by another, and also absolutely impossible for God to have caused anything to be in any respect different from what it now is, every thing that exists must needs be a part of the divine substance. This is not as a modification caused in it by any will, good pleasure, or wisdom in the whole (for he expressly denies God to act by any freedom of will or for the sake of final causes), but as of absolute necessity in itself with respect to the matter of the existence of each part, no less than with respect to the self-existence of the whole.

So that the opinion of Spinoza evidently comes to this: that the universe, or material world, is God, or the self-existent being, and that all particular beings—corporeal extension, the sun, moon, plants, animals, men, their motions, ideas, imaginations, and appetites—are all necessary modifications of him.

This monstrous system, though it has met with some patrons, has yet been sufficiently exposed and confuted by even the weakest of its adversaries, and indeed carries its antidote along with it. For Spinoza, to avoid the above-mentioned insuperable objection made to the Eleatics who held the universe to be immutable, falls into a worse extremity and attributes a continual change and corruption to the divine nature in respect of its various modifications. This doctrine shocks common sense. It is horrible to suppose the Deity both the cause and subject of all the moral and physical evils which are so frequent in the world. And what can be more absurd than to imagine matter—the vilest of all things, the theater of all changes, and the field of battle of contrary causes—to be that supreme, perfect being with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning? The very foundations of this hypothesis are in a moment overturned if we admit either a vacuum or the divisibility of matter, the one destroying the infinity and the other the unity of God. Therefore the Spinozists constantly deny both, ridiculously pretending that there can be no division of matter unless one part is separated from the other by empty space. It seems also impossible, according to this system, that the Deity can be an intelligent being. For perception and intelligence being really a distinct quality or perfection, and not a mere effect or composition of unintelligent figure and motion (as has been well proved), it follows that God could not possibly be possessed even of that imperfect understanding allowed him by Spinoza. However, being wholly separate from any power of will or choice, it is, in any respect of any excellency or indeed to any common sense, the very same thing as no understanding at all. Mr. Hobbes, who also held that there was no substance distinct from matter, being pressed in his own mind with the difficulty arising from the impossibility of sense or consciousness being merely the effect of figure and motion, is forced to recur to that prodigiously absurd supposition of the ancient Hylozoics: that all matter, as matter, is endued not only with figure and a capacity of motion, but also with an actual sense or perception, and wants only the organs and memory of animals to express its sensation.

The Opinion That Matter is Eternal, but Form is Not

The second opinion, that the substance of the universe is eternal though the form is not, was generally embraced by the ancients, who from that established axiom, "That nothing can be produced from nothing," concluded the creation of matter to be an absolute impossibility. But at the same time, they thought they had good reason to believe the world had not always been in its present state and disposition. They who held this opinion may be divided into two classes. The first endeavored to account for the generation of the world, or its reduction into the present form, from mechanical principles only and the activity of matter, without having recourse to the assistance of any divine power. The other introduced an intelligent mind as the architect and disposer of all things. But before we produce their several systems and notions, it may be proper to examine the principles they proceed upon more nearly.

There is no doubt that the creation of matter, on due weighing the arguments for and against it, will appear to be so far from impossible that it must necessarily be admitted. For if it is absurd to imagine matter to be the only substance, as has been sufficiently shown, it is much more so to suppose two or more eternal beings, which yet was not by the ancients thought to be contradictory. But this impious position, that God is not the creator of matter, being once laid down for truth, those philosophers who made God the Former, preserver, and director of the world, notwithstanding their seeming orthodoxy, argued much more inconsistently than those who denied him to have any concern with it. For if matter was an eternal uncreated being, and distinct from God, it owed its existence to its own nature only, depending on no other cause, either in respect of its essence or its properties. And it is contrary to all rules of reason that another being should exercise so great a power over matter as entirely to change it and form a world out of that which had been self-existent from all eternity without being a world. If God’s right to act in this manner is founded on his superior power, the same title would authorize all usurpations and confound all notions of right and wrong. If it is said that God dealt thus arbitrarily with matter out of a principle of goodness, on a supposition of its insensibility and precedent imperfection, the answer which has been given is that such a work would not be so much an instance of God’s goodness as an effect of superfluous diligence in endeavoring to put in order what he had not created, as if any order or perfection could be wanting in a being which had eternally subsisted of itself. For all accessions to such a being must be foreign to its nature, and consequently a defect. God therefore must in such a case have begun his work with an ill action, in going about to divest of its natural state a substance uncreated as well as himself and his own sister.

On the other hand, they who attribute the formation of the universe to mere matter and motion, without the intervention of a Deity, though they avoid the above-mentioned absurdities, yet fall into other difficulties as inextricable by supposing the eternal motion of matter, which they are obliged to do if they will not contradict their own maxim and admit motion at least to be produced out of nothing. But if motion is eternal, it was either eternally caused by some eternal intelligent being, which would again introduce the Deity whom they had excluded, or it must be of itself necessary and self-existent. Whence it would follow that it must be a contradiction in terms to suppose any matter to be at rest, or to suppose that there might possibly have been originally more or less motion in the universe than there actually was, both of which are consequences too absurd and ridiculous for any to admit. Or else, without any necessity in its own nature and without any external necessary cause, it must have existed from eternity by an endless successive communication, which is also a plain contradiction. For an infinite succession of merely dependent beings without any original cause is a series of beings which has neither necessity nor cause, nor any reason at all of its existence, neither within itself nor from without; that is, it is an express impossibility. A late author indeed has ventured to assert and pretended to prove that motion, that is the conatus or endeavor to move, is essential to all matter. But how philosophically may appear from this one consideration: The conatus to motion in any one particle of matter must be either a conatus to move some one determinate way at once, or to move every way at once. A conatus to move some one determinate way cannot be essential to any particle of matter but must arise from some external cause, because there is nothing in the pretended necessary nature of any particle to determine its motion necessarily and essentially one way rather than another. And a conatus equally to move every way at once is either an absolute contradiction or at least can produce nothing in matter but an eternal rest of all and every one of its parts.

The state wherein these philosophers conceived matter to have eternally been before the formation of the world is also liable to several objections. They generally supposed the original of the earth to have been from a chaos, or a dark, confused, fluid mass, without distinction of elements and made up of all variety of parts, but without order or any determinate form. To this chaos they attributed a certain motion arising from the action and reaction of the first four qualities and the different tending of the particles of earth and water downwards, and their air and fire upwards. This motion they absurdly enough imagined to have been irregular and disorderly until it was stopped or changed into a regular and natural motion, either by chance or divine power. But Aristotle has long ago observed that the supposition of such an irregular motion destroys itself, for it is impossible that what is infinite and eternal should be moved in a disorderly manner but must necessarily have a regular and natural motion. Whence it follows that the production of the world would rather have been an overturning than introducing the true natural state. For which reason he says Anaxagoras seemed to have been in the right when he began his formation of the world from matter entirely at rest. So that if we admit the motion of the chaotic particles to have been natural and according to their several qualities and properties, the very possibility of matter’s having continued in that state from eternity is destroyed, because we then introduce a principle which will necessarily separate the several kinds of bodies one from the other, and that in a certain limited space of time. This principle also renders the assistance of a Deity unnecessary, for if the chaos is acknowledged to have in itself all the internal power that is requisite for the separation of its parts and the placing of every element in its proper situation, there can be no occasion for the intervention of any external cause.

To reason well, therefore, concerning the production of the world, we must consider God as the author of matter and as the first and sole principle of motion. If we cannot raise our minds so high as to conceive a creation properly so called, whichever way we turn, we shall find ourselves driven to assertions and suppositions directly contrary to reason and be involved in an endless labyrinth of absurdities and contradictions.

But however mistaken they who held this opinion were in accounting for the origin of the world, they had great reason to assert that it had a beginning and was once formed out of a confused chaos. For though the precise time of this formation could not have been exactly known without revelation, yet even at this day, there are remaining many considerable and very strong rational proofs which make it exceedingly probable that this present frame and constitution of the earth, at least, has been of no very ancient date. The changes which must necessarily fall out naturally in the earth in a vast length of time—by petrification, the sinking and washing down of mountains, the daily encroaching of the land upon the sea, the consumption of water by plants, and innumerable other accidents; the universal tradition of the most ancient nations, both learned and barbarous; the number of men with which the earth is at present inhabited; the late original and invention of all useful arts and sciences; the shortness of the history of the world, which reaches up but to a very few ages; the manifest absurdities and contradictions of those few accounts which pretend to a greater antiquity; the impossibility that universal deluges or other accidents should at certain long periods have oftentimes destroyed far the greatest part of mankind, with the memory of all former actions and inventions, and yet never have happened to destroy them all—these and many more arguments drawn from nature, reason, and observation make it exceedingly probable that the formation of the earth was novel and of no great antiquity. And it is not to be doubted but that the doctrine of those ancient poets and philosophers who taught that the world had a beginning was founded on still more ancient traditions, which were so many authorities to them, as their testimonies are at this day to us.

Having observed this much, it is time to take a view of the different hypotheses which may be ranged under this head. We shall begin with those who, excluding all divine interposition, accounted for the formation of the universe from the properties and action of matter only. And with this doctrine, the most ancient profane accounts we have now remaining of the origin of the world—namely, the Phoenician, Egyptian, and Babylonian—have been charged. But whether justly or not must be left to the judgment of the reader after we shall have laid before him first the accounts themselves and then the observations which have been made on them.

The Phoenician Cosmogony

The first of them is that of the Phoenicians, which has been transmitted to us by Sanchoniatho, one of their own writers, and was originally taken, as he assures us, from the cosmogony of Taautus, who was the same with the Egyptian Thoth, or Hermes. He wrote that the first principle of the universe was a dark and spiritual (or windy) air, or a spirit of dark air, and a turbid, obscure chaos; and that these things were infinite and for many ages had no bounds. But when the spirit was affected with love towards its own principles and a mixture followed, that conjunction was called desire. This was the beginning of the formation of all things, but the spirit did not know (or acknowledge) its own production. From this conjunction of the spirit was begotten Môt, which some call mud, others a corruption of a watery mixture, and of this came the seed of all creatures and the generation of the universe. He wrote that there were certain animals which had no sense, from which proceeded intelligent animals called Zophasemin, that is, the contemplators of heaven, being formed alike in the shape of an egg. Immediately Môt, with the sun, moon, stars, and larger constellations, shone forth. The air being intensely enlightened by the violent degree of heat communicated to the sea and earth, winds were generated, and clouds, and great descents and defluxions of the heavenly waters. And when they were separated and drawn from their proper place by the heat of the sun, and then met all again in the air and dashed one against the other, thunders and lightnings were engendered. And at the noise of the thunders, the before-mentioned intelligent animals awoke and were terrified with the sound, and male and female moved in the earth and in the sea.

Eusebius of Caesarea, to whom we are obliged for preserving this fragment, observes that this cosmogony of the Phoenicians directly brings in atheism. Sanchoniatho, he says, delivered no divinity or theology concerning the supreme God, nor concerning the inhabitants of heaven or angels. This observation has been approved and pursued by a late, very learned man who, with great reason, looked on this account of the origin of things as a professed apology for the idolatrous worship paid to dead men and the several parts of the universe. Thoth, he says, led his transcriber into the foulest sink of heathenism, which is neglect of the sovereign and only true God in the making, and consequently of the governing, of the world. He endeavored to establish the vain and foolish religion of the Phoenicians and Egyptians, who worshipped the creature more than the creator, by pretending to give a generation of the world without any help from God and supposing that the heathen deities, the Zophasemin (which were the planets and fixed stars), passed gradually from the life of planets, which have no sense (and yet some of them were worshipped), through the state of sensible animals, which were more solemnly served, till at length they came to be perfect intelligences and so worthy to challenge the highest worship which they gave to them, in which their state religion consisted.

On the other hand, it has been remarked that it is well known Eusebius took all advantages possible to represent the pagans to their worst and render their theology ridiculous and absurd. And that if the best interpretation is put on the words of Sanchoniatho, it is not improbable that the Phoenicians supposed two principles, of which one was a turbid dark chaos and the other a spirit, or an understanding, prolific goodness, forming and hatching the corporeal world into perfection. The eternity of which spirit seems also to be asserted by what follows: that it knew not its own generation, that is, had no original at all. But this Phoenician cosmogony being confessedly taken from that of Thoth, and consequently agreeing in substance with the Egyptian, which is therefore under the same imputation of atheism, judgment may be suspended until that is considered also.

The Egyptian Cosmogony

The account of the origin of the universe given us by Diodorus Siculus is generally supposed to be the cosmogony of the Egyptians, though Diodorus himself does not say as much, and is as follows: When the universe first coalesced, heaven and earth were of one form, their nature being blended together. But afterwards, as bodies separated, the world took on it the entire disposition wherein we now behold it, and the air began to have a constant motion. Upon which its fiery parts flew to the upper regions, being naturally carried upwards by their own levity, and hence proceeded the rapid circular motion of the sun and other stars. The muddy and turbid matter, after it had been incorporated with the humid, subsided in one place by its own weight and being agitated with continual internal volutations. Of the watery parts, the sea became formed, and of the more solid, the earth, which was slimy and very soft at first. But stiffening by the rays of the sun, the surface began to ferment by reason of the heat, and some of the humid parts swelled and rose by degrees into putrid pustules, covered with thin membranes. The humid matter, being thus fecundated by the genial heat, by night received nutriment from the mist falling from the ambient air, and by day grew more and more solid by the sun’s warmth, until at length the enclosed brood being arrived at perfect maturity, and the membranes burnt up and burst, all kinds of creatures were produced. Of these, those which had obtained the greater degree of heat became volatiles and flew upwards; those in which the earthy concretion prevailed were placed in the rank of reptiles and other terrestrial animals; and the creatures which chiefly consisted of a watery nature repaired to a congenial element and were called fish. At length the earth, continually hardening more and more by the heat of the sun and by the winds, could no longer produce any of the larger animals, but they began to propagate their several species by generation. And to obviate any objection against the possibility of the earth’s producing living creatures, our author instances in the vast number of mice which are said to be bred in upper Egypt out of the putrefied mud after the overflowing of the Nile.

This cosmogony, as has been observed, agrees in substance with the former but is more large (as later commentaries use to be) in particulars and nice attempts at a mechanic explication of the generation of the world without any help from God. This consent is an argument that they took their notions from the same fountain, Thoth. And Eusebius makes the same observation on this latter as he does on the former: that the name of God is not so much as mentioned therein, but a kind of fortuitous and spontaneous formation of the universe is introduced. To confirm which judgment, he in another place recites a passage of Porphyry who, in his epistle to Anebo, an Egyptian priest, writes that Chaeremon and others thought there was nothing prior to the visible worlds and began their discourses with the Egyptian gods, which were no other than the planets and stars which fill the zodiac, or those which rise with them. Forasmuch as they who made the sun the Demiurgus, or architect of the world, interpreted their stories of Isis and Osiris and the rest of their sacred fables altogether into the stars and planets and the river Nile, and explained all things universally into natural or inanimate and nothing into incorporeal and living substances. From whence Eusebius infers that even the secret theology of the Egyptians deified no other than the stars and planets and acknowledged no incorporeal principle of the universe, nor any demiurgic reason, God, or gods, or intelligent and invisible powers, but the visible sun only, referring the production of all things to the material, senseless, and perishable elements. Herewith agrees also that concise account of the Egyptian philosophy given us by Diogenes Laertius from Manetho and Hecataeus: that matter was the first principle, out of which the four elements were afterwards separated, and all kinds of animals perfectly formed, and that the sun and moon were their gods, the one being called Osiris and the other Isis.

From this imputation of acknowledging no Deity besides stupid matter, the Egyptians have been strenuously defended by a very able man, who thinks what Eusebius urges against them to be of the less weight because he plainly contradicts it elsewhere, by declaring that that nation professed the belief of a demiurgic reason and intellectual architect of the world, whom he tells us, from the same Porphyry, they called Cneph and symbolically represented in the shape of a man of a dark blue complexion, holding a girdle and a scepter, with a royal plume on his head, and thrusting forth an egg out of his mouth, from whence proceeded another god, whom they named Phtha, and the Greeks Vulcan. The reason of which hieroglyphic is thus given: because this intellectual being is difficult to be found out, hidden, and invisible, and because he is the giver of life and king of all things, and because he is moved in an intellectual or spiritual manner, which is signified by the feathers on his head. The egg which proceeds from the mouth of this god is interpreted to be the world. The first most divine Being was also sometimes described as a serpent with a hawk’s head, beautiful to look on, who, if he opens his eyes, fills the universe with light in his first born region; but if he winks, darkness is made. And as for that passage in Porphyry’s epistle concerning Chaeremon, where he only propounds doubts to Anebo, as desiring further information from him concerning them, Iamblichus has given an answer to it, under the person of Abammon, another Egyptian priest, who says that Chaeremon and those others who pretend to write of the first causes of the world declare only the last and lowest principles, as likewise those who treat of the planets, zodiac, and other astronomical matters. For the Egyptians did not resolve all things into nature but distinguished both the life of the soul and the intellectual life from that of nature, not in the universe only but in man also, acknowledging an intellectual mind and reason first to have existed of themselves, and so this whole world to have been made.

From this testimony of Iamblichus, who was but little junior to Porphyry and contemporary with Eusebius, and who had made it his business to inform himself thoroughly of the Egyptian theology, it plainly appears that the Egyptians did not generally suppose (as Chaeremon pretended concerning some of them) a senseless inanimate nature to be the first original of all things, but that as well in the world as in ourselves, they acknowledged soul superior to nature, and mind or intellect superior to soul, this being the maker of the world. And many passages to the same purpose might be produced from the same writer and from the Hermetic books now extant, among which, though much is forged and spurious, yet it seems very probable that they contain some remains and tincture of the old Egyptian and Hermetic doctrine. But we cannot omit observing that it was thought to be so notorious and confessed a thing that the Egyptians held the world not only to have had a beginning but also to have been made by God, that Simplicius, a zealous contender for the world’s eternity, affirms the Mosaic history of the creation of the world by God to have been nothing else but a fabulous tradition and wholly drawn from Egyptian fables.

But these different authorities may be perhaps reconciled by distinguishing between the religion of Lower Egypt, whose inhabitants were gross idolaters, and that of Thebes, where the worship of Cneph, the immortal and supreme God, so much prevailed that they were not taxed towards the charge of maintaining the sacred animals worshipped by the others.

Before we dismiss the Egyptians, it may not be amiss to observe that their priests also taught that the earth had certain periods or revolutions, being destroyed alternately by water and fire and renewed again.

The Babylonian Cosmogony

As to the Chaldeans or Babylonians, Diodorus says they held the nature of the world to be eternal and that it had neither any original generation nor is subject to any future corruption. Yet that the order and beautiful disposition of all things were caused by a divine providence, and that whatever are now in the heavens were not casual or spontaneous, but perfected by the determinate and established decree of the gods. But Berossus, who ought to challenge the greater authority, both in respect to his antiquity and his being himself of that nation, has left us the following account of their cosmogony, taken from what Oannes (of whom more hereafter) wrote concerning the origin of things. There was, says he, a time when the universe was darkness and water, wherein frightful animals of compounded forms were generated. That some men were born with two wings, others with four and two faces; some having but one body and two heads, one of a man, the other of a woman, and double privities, of the male and of the female. That of other men, some had the legs and horns of goats, some horse’s feet, others the hinder parts of horses and the fore parts of men, being in the form of Hippocentaurs. That bulls were generated having the heads of men, and dogs with four bodies, having in their hinder parts the tails of fishes, and horses with dog’s heads; that there were also men and other animals which had the heads and bodies of horses, but the tails of fishes, and other living creatures having the shapes of all kinds of beasts. Besides these, there were also generated fishes and creeping things and serpents and many other animals very wonderful and having the mixed shapes of one another, whose pictures are also kept in the temple of Belus. The governess of all these was a woman named Omoroca, which in the Chaldee tongue is Thalatth, but in Greek signifies the sea, and with equal propriety the moon.

This being the constitution of the universe, Belus came and divided the woman in the midst, and of one half of her made the earth and the other half the heaven, and the animals which were in her perished. But he says that these things are delivered concerning the nature of the world in an allegorical manner. For the world being humid, and animals generated therein, the aforesaid god took away the woman’s head, and the other gods mixed her body, which fell down, with the earth and formed men, for which reason they are intelligent and partake of divine wisdom. That Belus, whom they interpret Jupiter, cutting the darkness in the midst, divided the earth and the heaven from each other and reduced the world into order; whereupon the animals, not bearing the force of the light, became extinct. But Belus seeing the country desert, though fertile, commanded one of the gods to cut off his own head and to mix the earth with the blood which issued thence, and to form men and beasts that could endure the air. And that Belus perfected the stars and the sun and the moon and the five planets.

From this passage we learn that the old Babylonians expressly attributed the orderly disposition of the world, the perfecting of the heavenly bodies, and the formation of men and animals to their supreme god, Bel, though they seem to have held the pre-existence of matter. It must therefore be some theology of the later Babylonians which could with justice be charged, as it has been, with passing over in silence the one principle of the universe. Wherein they must have departed from the tradition of their ancestors, the ancient Chaldeans, who were celebrated for their acknowledging one sovereign deity or maker of the world, as appears from that oracle of Apollo cited by Eusebius from Porphyry, where the Chaldeans and Hebrews are alone declared to be possessed of true wisdom, as worshipping God, the self-begotten king, in a holy manner.

We have indeed another account of the cosmogony in the Chaldaic or Magic oracles of Zoroaster, but they have so little pretense to genuineness or antiquity, are so confused a medley of ill-digested notions taken chiefly from the Platonics and Gnostics, very unsatisfactory as to the origin of the universe, and talk so much of unknown matter, the orders of invisible things, mystical numbers, Iynges, and other unintelligible jargon, that we might be excused from taking any notice of them. But as a very learned man has thought it worth his while to extract the substance of what is most intelligible in them, we shall subjoin it in his own words: The Chaldeans, says he, believe that the first of all things is eternal, the supreme God. That God, who is an intellectual light or fire, did not shut up his fire within his intellectual power, but communicated it to all creatures: first, and immediately, to the first Mind, and to all other eternal and incorporeal beings, under which notion are comprehended a multitude of gods, angels, good daemons, and the souls of men. The next emanation is the supramundane light, an incorporeal, infinite, luminous space, in which the intellectual beings reside. The supramundane light kindles the first corporeal world, the empyreum, or fiery heaven, which, being immediately beneath the corporeal light, is the highest, brightest, and rarest of bodies. The empyreum diffuses itself through the aether, which is the next body below it, and the fire less refined than the empyreum; but that it is fire, the more condensed parts thereof, the sun and stars, sufficiently evince. From the aether, this fire is transmitted to the material and sublunary world; for though the matter whereof it consists is not light but darkness (as are also the material or bad daemons), yet this vivificative fire actuates and gives life to all its parts, insinuating, diffusing itself, and penetrating even to the very center, passing from above to the opposite part, through the center of the earth.

The Ancient Pagan Poets

The old pagan poets, who greatly contributed to the depravation of theology in general, have more particularly countenanced this opinion of the world’s being produced from a chaos without the influence of God. For though they make Love to preside, as it were, at the ranging of the confused matter (by which some would have us understand the Deity, or the active principle of the universe distinct from matter), yet it is most probable they thereby meant no more than the agreement or harmony which ensued on the cessation of that intestine war of the elements. Their Love had his original from the chaos, as well as all the rest of their gods, which were really no other than the heavenly bodies, elements, and other parts of nature, personated and deified. For which reason, the cosmogony of the poets was the same with their theogony, or generation of gods.

Orpheus, who was the great introducer of the rites of heathen worship among the Greeks, being charged with having invented the very names of the gods and declaring their generations and their several actions (wherein he was for the most part followed by Homer), is yet said to have been perfectly silent in his theology as to anything intellectual, as unspeakable and unknown. He made one of his principles to be a dragon, having the heads both of a bull and a lion, and in the midst, the face of a god, with golden wings on his shoulders. But notwithstanding the extravagancy of Orpheus’s fancy, the generality of the Greek pagans, looking on the man not as a mere poet but a holy and profound philosopher, supposed all his fables of the gods to be deep mysteries and allegories which had some hidden and secret sense under them, and therefore had a high veneration for him as one divinely inspired. Insomuch that Celsus would have had the Christians rather take Orpheus for a god than Christ, as being a man unquestionably endued with a holy spirit and one who also died a violent death. And though he was the great propagator of polytheism, yet it has been thought that he acknowledged one supreme unmade Deity as the original of all things, not only from the great esteem he was in with those two most religious philosophic sects, the Pythagoreans and Platonists (he being commonly called by them the Theologer), but also because they were supposed in great measure to have owed their theology and philosophy to him, as deriving the same from his principles and traditions.

This favorable opinion of Orpheus will yet be better founded if we allow the epitome of the Orphic cosmogony, made long ago by Timotheus the chronographer, to contain the true doctrine of that poet. For he writes that Orpheus gave an account of the generation of the gods, the creation of the world, and the formation of man, professing that he delivered nothing from his own invention, but as he was informed, on enquiry, by Phoebus, Titan, or the sun. Which account in brief is, that in the beginning the aether, or heaven, was formed by God, and that on each side of the aether was chaos and dark night, which covered whatsoever was under the aether, thereby signifying that night was prior. He declared also that there was a certain incomprehensible Being, which was the highest and most ancient of all things and the maker of the universe, both of the aether itself and of things under the aether. That the earth was invisible, by reason of the darkness which was upon it; but the light, breaking forth through the aether, illuminated the whole creation. This light, which so broke forth, was said by him to be that highest of all things before mentioned, whose name as revealed by the oracle was Counsel, Light, and the Giver of Life. That these three names manifest one and the same power and might of that invisible and incomprehensible God, who is the maker of all things, and who bringeth that which is not into a state of existence. By which power were produced all incorporeal principles, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars, the earth, and the sea, and all things therein, both visible and invisible. He likewise declared that mankind was formed out of the earth by the same Deity and received from him a rational soul, agreeably to what Moses has recorded. Timotheus adds that the same Orpheus also wrote that all things were made by one godhead of three names, and that this God is all things.

If this testimony is admitted, we need not appeal to the Orphic verses, which are very full as to the assertion of the supreme Deity. It is true, many of those verses are supposititious and manifestly forged either by Christians or Jews, but all of them cannot be proved to be so. Several are cited by pagan authors as written, if not by Orpheus himself, yet by persons of great antiquity and well acquainted with his doctrine and traditions, and therefore by men of good learning and judgment thought genuine and worthy of some regard. However, Orpheus’s theology has been preferred to that of the other heathens by the Christian fathers. And a late ingenious writer has surmised that his establishing of polytheism was owing rather to the necessity he was under of complying with the stupidity of the barbarous people whom he first civilized than his own approbation, being obliged to give them not the religion which himself best approved, but such a one as they were capable of receiving.

But to return to the Orphic cosmogony, Syrianus says that Orpheus held two principles, aether and chaos. To which Simplicius adds a third as prior to the other two, namely, time, the measure of the fabulous generation of the gods, after which, according to Orpheus, the aether and chaos were produced. By which it should seem he thought the aether and chaos were co-eval. But it has been observed that the ancients, or the later authors who have handed their opinions down to us, do frequently confound the universe with this sublunary world and apply what relates distinctly to one of the two to the other, or both promiscuously. And that of the aether here mentioned, the celestial or first fabric of things was made, and of the chaos, the sublunary world, or our earth and others like it, at several distant intervals. Which things ought to have been separately treated, as well with regard to the matter as to the time, though unskillful authors have often neglected that necessary distinction.

It is proper here to observe that Orpheus, among other eastern learning, seems to have first introduced among the Greeks the doctrine of the mundane egg, which in all probability he learned from the Egyptians, who represented the world by that symbol, as many other ancient nations did. The Phoenicians, as we have seen, made their Zophasemin, which were the celestial bodies, oviform, and worshipped an egg in the Orgia of Bacchus as an image of the world. And the same comparison or resemblance was made use of by the Chaldeans, Persians, Indians, and Chinese, as will be observed hereafter. And this not only for its external figure but also for the inward composition of it: the shell representing the heaven, the white the air, and the yolk the earth, though others make out this resemblance in a different manner. Hence Plutarch observes that the question, which was the elder, the egg or the hen, was not a trivial enquiry but, according to the Orphic doctrine, comprehended the ancient generation of all things. And the author of the hymns attributed to Orpheus makes the first-born god, named by the Greeks Phanes, to be produced from an egg. This was the first-begotten god mentioned by Athenagoras to have been hatched from the egg, as the followers of Orpheus taught.

Another opinion of the Orphic theologians which must not be forgotten was that God was all things. But this is not to be understood in a gross sense, so as to take away all distinction between God and the creature. For they taught this doctrine chiefly on the two following accounts: First, because all things coming from God, they inferred that therefore they were all contained in him, and consequently were, in a certain sense, himself. The second is because the world produced by God and really existing without him is not therefore quite cut off from him, nor subsists alone by itself as a dead thing, but is still livingly united to him, essentially dependent on him, always supported, quickened, and pervaded by him. In the latter of which senses, some Christian divines also have made God to be all, as when they affirm the whole world to be nothing else but God expanded, and when they call the creatures, as St. Jerome and others often do, the rays of the Deity. But though the scripture itself may seem to give some countenance to these expressions, yet they ought to be used with great caution, being easily liable to mistake and abuse. And the mistake and abuse of this one thing might possibly have been a chief ground of the both seeming and real polytheism, not only of the Greek and European, but also of the Egyptian and other pagans. They concluded that because God was all things, and consequently all things God, therefore God ought to be worshipped in all things, that is, in the several parts of nature.

Whether the preceding opinions as to the original of the world are acquitted of the charge of atheism or not, it is certain that the philosophy which derives all things from senseless matter, in the way of forms and qualities, without the assistance of a God, was of great antiquity and as old as any records of time among the Greeks. The ancient physiologers generally made the ocean, or water, to have been the original of all things. For which reason, the oath of the gods is said to be by water, called by the poets Styx, which, being most ancient, deserved the greatest reverence and was consequently most proper to swear by. And hence the ocean is by Homer called the progenitor of the gods and source of all things. Thales, the prince of the Ionic philosophers, held water to be the first principle whereof all things consisted, and they also supposed that at last all things should be dissolved and return into water again. But it seems that those ancients, when they made water to have been the first principle, did not thereby mean the elementary water, but the chaos, which was a fluid substance, as the Greek word signifies. For which reason, Zeno and Plutarch took the chaos of Hesiod to have been water.

Hesiod and Aristophanes

The theogony of this last mentioned poet, which, as has been observed, is also his cosmogony, is somewhat confused, beginning twice from the chaos and relating things rather in a poetical than philosophical order. The substance of what he delivers is that in the beginning, the chaos first existed, then the wide-extended earth, and next love, the fairest of the immortal gods. That the chaos produced Erebus and Night, from the conjunction of which two proceeded Aether and Day. After which he proceeds to give an account of the separation of the heaven and stars from the earth, the raising of mountains, and sinking of caves, and of the production of the sea from the heaven and earth together.

But there is a much more methodical and complete description of this ancient cosmogony given by Aristophanes, whence-so-ever he had it. He writes that first were Chaos, black Erebus, and wide Tartarus, but neither earth, nor air, nor heaven. That Night, with sable wings, laid the first egg of wind in the vast bosom of Erebus, from whence, in process of time, issued amiable Love, shining with wings of gold, like to impetuous whirlwinds. That Love, coupling with the obscure chaos, engendered animals and men, but that there were no gods before Love mingled all things, from which mixture of things one with another, the heaven and the earth were generated, and the whole race of immortal gods.

This passage, notwithstanding it is ludicrously introduced in a comedy, is conceived, not without reason, to have been really a piece of the old atheistic system and may be thus explained: that chaos, or matter confusedly moved, being the original of all, things did from thence rise up gradually from lesser to greater perfection; first inanimate things, as the elements, heaven, earth, and seas; then brute animals; afterwards men; and last of all gods. As if not only the substance of matter and those inanimate bodies of the elements—fire, water, air, and earth—were first in order of nature before God (as being themselves also gods), but also irrational animals at least, if not men too. And this is the atheistic creation of the world, gods, and all, out of senseless and stupid matter, or dark chaos, as the only original deity.

Thales and the Ionian Philosophers

Whether Thales, who was a Phoenician by extraction, acknowledged any divine or intelligent being as assisting in the formation of the world is a great question. Cicero indeed tells us that he was the first who searched after such things and affirmed God to be that Mind which created all things out of water. And Laertius reports that he used to say God was the oldest of all things and that the world was the workmanship of God. But on the other side, there are a cloud of witnesses, among whom are Cicero and Laertius themselves, who with joint consent give Anaxagoras, one of his successors, the honor of having first rejected all chance in the disposition of the universe and introduced a pure intelligent mind to separate and compose the several parts of it. So that all the philosophers of the Ionic sect who preceded Anaxagoras being mere materialists or Hylopathian atheists, Aristotle seems justly to have called Thales the prince or leader of that philosophy. The occasion of his being thus differently represented may possibly have been because he left no philosophic writings or monuments of his own behind him (Anaxagoras being the first of all the philosophic writers). Whence probably it came to pass that in after times some interpreted his opinions one way and some another, and that he is sometimes represented as a theist and sometimes as an atheist.

But if Thales is acquitted, yet his next successor, Anaximander, can by no means be excused from this imputation. For he supposed a certain infinite first matter, which he did not define to be either air or water or earth, to be the sole principle of the universe. That the celestial bodies and infinite worlds were made of it by secretion, and that generation and corruption proceeded from their moving circularly together from eternity. He also asserted that the generative principles of heat and cold being separated when this world was made, a certain sphere of fire first arose and encompassed the air which surrounds the earth, as the bark does a tree. This being afterwards broken and divided into smaller spherical bodies formed the sun, moon, and stars. He held also that the first animals were generated in moisture and encompassed with certain thorny barks by which they were defended, which after further growth, becoming more dry and cracking, they issued forth but lived only a short time. That men were at first generated in the bellies of fishes, and being there nourished till they grew strong and were able to support themselves, they were afterwards cast out upon dry land. And the reason of this strange opinion as to the original of mankind was because other animals soon after their birth betake themselves to their food, but man alone in his infancy needs to be nursed up for a considerable time and therefore could not be preserved at first in any other manner.

From Anaximander’s making this universal principle of his infinite, some late writers, and even Clemens Alexandrinus among the ancients, have groundlessly inferred that he thereby meant God according to the true notion of him, or an infinite mind, the efficient cause of the universe, and not stupid matter. But it is plain that the gods he acknowledged owed their original also to that infinite matter from which he supposed all things to be secreted and into which they would return. For he held the gods to be generated, rising and vanishing again in long periods of time, and that these gods were innumerable worlds.

The physiology of Anaximenes differed but little from that of his master Anaximander, for he held air to be the first principle, and infinite, but that the things which arose thereout were finite and should at last be resolved into it again. He supposed that all things were generated by a successive condensation and rarefaction of this air, the earth, water, and fire being first produced thereout, and then the other parts of the universe. He held also that motion was from all eternity, that the sun gained its heat from the swiftness of its course, and that air held the world together in the same manner as the soul, which he took to be air also, did the human frame. He did not, it seems, deny there were any gods, but was so far from allowing them to have formed the world that he believed them likewise to have their rise from the air. Plutarch, after delivering the opinions of these two philosophers, observes that they were both of them in the wrong in supposing the world to have been generated from matter only without any efficient cause; matter of itself being able to produce nothing, no more than a vessel can be made out of a mass of silver without the help of an artificer.

Anaxagoras and Diogenes of Apollonia, two scholars of Anaximenes, attempted to remedy this grand defect in the Ionic philosophy by amending their master’s hypothesis. The first, by admitting an intelligent being distinct from matter, as has been and will be more fully observed; and the other, by supposing the air, the first principle of the universe, to be endued with a divine reason, without which he conceived nothing could be produced from it. So that this opinion differed very little from Spinozism.

The manner in which this latter philosophizes as to the production of the world has so near a conformity with the Cartesian hypothesis that it would be wrong to omit it: All things, says he, being in motion, some became condensed and others rarefied. In those places where condensation prevailed, a whirling motion or vortex was formed, which by its revolution drew in the rest, and the lighter parts flying upwards formed the sun.

The Atomic Philosophy

The next atheistic system of philosophy is the atomic, which is generally supposed to have been invented by Democritus, who was elder than Aristotle and Plato. But Laertius attributes it to Leucippus, who was somewhat senior to Democritus, though he wrote not so much concerning it as Democritus did. Others make this physiology much more ancient. Posidonius avouched it for an old tradition that the first inventor of it was Moschus, a Phoenician who lived before the Trojan war, and is supposed to have been the same with Mochus, the Phoenician physiologer mentioned by Iamblichus, with whose successors, priests, and prophets, he affirms that Pythagoras, while he was at Sidon, had conversed. But as Cicero, though Posidonius’s scholar, scruples not to question his veracity in some things and expressly affirms Leucippus or Democritus to have been the author of this philosophy, we think his authority of little weight. Much less can we approve, as Mr. Selden does, of the conjecture of Arcerius, the editor of Iamblichus, that this Mochus was no other than Moses, the celebrated prophet of the Jews. However, it is probable from some other considerations that Pythagoras was not unacquainted with the atomical physiology. For Democritus himself was of the Italic or Pythagoric succession and is reported to have taken all his philosophy from them. And the famous monads of Pythagoras are by some supposed to have been nothing else but corporeal atoms. That Empedocles, who was also a Pythagorean, took the world to be compounded of minute particles is expressly asserted and will appear more plainly when we come to give an account of his physiology. And the natural principles of Ecphantus the Syracusan, another of that sect, were indivisible bodies and vacuum. Nor were they the only ancient philosophers who went that way; Xenocrates, Heraclides, Asclepiades, Diodorus, Metrodorus of Chios, and the generality of the old physiologers having also supposed indivisible particles to be the first principles of bodies.

Notwithstanding which, Leucippus and Democritus are reputed the first inventors of the atomic philosophy, either because they brought it to greater perfection, or else because they first made it a complete and entire system by itself, so as to derive the original of all things in the whole universe from senseless atoms, which had figure and motion only, and space. From whence it would follow that there could be no God, not so much as a corporeal one. For before them, the doctrine of atoms made not an entire philosophy by itself but was looked upon as a part or member of the whole philosophic system, and that the meanest and lowest part too. It was only used to explain that which was purely corporeal in the world. Besides which, they acknowledged something else which was not mere bulk and mechanism but life and self-activity, that is, immaterial substance, the head whereof is a Deity distinct from the world. So that there have been two sorts of atomists: the first, holding incorporeal substance, used that physiology in a way of subordination to theology. The other, allowing no other substance but body, made senseless atoms, without any mind or understanding—that is, without any God—to be the original of all things. Which latter system is that vulgarly known by the name of the atomic philosophy, which was founded by Leucippus and Democritus and afterwards, with some alteration, taught by Epicurus, though he would not acknowledge that he had borrowed his hypothesis from any.

But whoever first introduced it, this hypothesis occasioned a more strict and accurate method of philosophizing than had formerly been used. For the atomists, neglecting numbers, proportions, harmonies, ideas, qualities, and elementary forms, immediately proceeded to examine the bodies themselves and their physical and mechanical properties: their motion, figure, situation of parts, size, and the like. From whence they very rationally ascertained their several powers, determined their actions, and explained their effects, though the notions they entertained of the indivisibility of their atoms, their innate power of motion, inclinations to certain places, and the like, are not only without any foundation but repugnant to reason.

The doctrine of Leucippus and Democritus as to the origin of the world was that the first principles were an infinite number of atoms, or indivisible particles of different sizes and figures, which moving fortuitously, or without design, from all eternity in infinite space, and encountering one another, became variously implicated and entangled and produced first a confused chaos of all kinds of particles. Afterwards, by continual agitation, striking and repelling each other, they disposed themselves into a vortex or vortices where, after many convolutions and evolutions, molitions and essays, in which all imaginable shapes and combinations were tried, they chanced at length to settle into this present form and system of things.

This hypothesis as to the formation of the principal parts of the world agrees with that of Epicurus, as it is represented by Lucretius, excepting that no mention is made of those vortices, which yet were an essential part of the former. To the two properties attributed to atoms by Democritus, magnitude and figure, Epicurus added a third: weight, without which he did not conceive they could move at all. And one of the inevitable consequences of the Democritic system being absolute fatal necessity (for when they maintained that the world was made by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, it was not their meaning to deny the world to have been necessarily made according to the eternal laws of motion of those atoms, but only to exclude the direction of an intelligent cause), and such necessity, in the opinion of Epicurus, overturning all morality and reducing the human soul to be a mere machine, in order to account for freedom of will, besides the twofold motion of atoms allowed by those before him, perpendicular and reflexive, he introduced a third. He supposed that the atoms could of themselves decline from the right line and move obliquely, even in void space and without any collision at all, from which, as he strangely inferred, proceeded natural liberty. And this declination served also another purpose, that is, to explain the meeting of the atoms, which, if they all moved one way, would have been impossible. But the most material difference between the two hypotheses, though not often taken notice of, was that Epicurus admitted no principle at all but the atoms themselves, whereas Democritus believed them to be animated. This is a supposition not a whit more absurd than that of their existence and spontaneous motion, and which would yet be of great use in obviating several objections to the atomic system, otherwise unanswerable.

As to the production of animals and mankind, the Epicurean philosophy accounted for it in this manner: It was supposed that the new-formed earth, containing in it the seeds of all things, the sun, acting by its heat on the moister parts, raised small bladders, like little wombs, in which the embryos, at first imperfect, were conceived, and through which they broke their way when arrived at maturity. And that for their nourishment, nature provided bags like small breasts furnished with a milky juice. And it is pretended that this fecundity cannot seem strange in that juvenile vigor of nature if we consider what numbers of smaller creatures and insects are at this day bred in the same way. But at length, the seeds of the earth being exhausted, she, like a woman past child-bearing, of course left off this way of producing the more perfect animals. Whence it is that every species is now propagated by copulation.

This atomic system, which had been superseded by Plato and Aristotle, who brought in ideas, form, and qualities instead of the mechanical properties of matter, was raised by Epicurus to a high degree of reputation and continued to flourish after his death beyond any other philosophy, though it was justly decried by the other sects on account of the atheism which naturally followed from its principles. Had Democritus only supposed God to be a mind or intelligence placed in a sphere of fire and the soul of the world, he would have been much more excusable than in teaching, as he did, that the images of objects which on every side present themselves to us, and the nature which scatters round or emits such images, and even our own knowledge and understanding, were to be reckoned among the gods. So that what Democritus called God had neither the unity, nor eternity, nor immutability, nor other attributes which are essential to the divine nature. And yet an opinion very like his was not long ago advanced, on the supposition that our ideas are in God and that they cannot be a modification of a created mind, from which it seems to follow that our ideas are God himself. As to Epicurus, he acknowledged indeed that there were gods and that they deserved to be worshipped on account of the excellence of their nature, though no benefit was to be expected from them nor any harm to be feared, for he allowed them to be neither the makers nor the governors of the world. And yet a very learned man has lately undertaken the defense of Epicurus as to this latter point and maintained that he did not deny a divine providence. He supposed the gods were immortal and supremely happy, leading a life of perfect inaction and tranquility; that they were of human form, yet had not real bodies and blood but something analogous to them. And least he should at once destroy their immortality and subject them to destruction, he taught that they were not composed of atoms like other beings, though some have, by mistake, affirmed the contrary. It is well known that this corpuscular philosophy has been revived by some moderns who, rejecting the eternity of the atoms and their fortuitous motion but following in almost all other respects the old hypothesis of Leucippus, have made a very fine system of it. This is what Gassendi has done, who differs from Des Cartes as to the principles of bodies in nothing but the retaining a vacuum. The scholastic divines among the Mohammedans, who are very orthodox as to the creation of the world by God, do also admit both atoms and a vacuum. But their atoms are different from those of Leucippus, for they have no magnitude and are all like one another, and they suppose, as that philosopher ought to have done, that every atom of a living body is alive, that every atom of a sensitive body is endued with sense, and that the understanding resides in an atom, though they differ as to the soul and knowledge, whether they consist in a single atom or a collection of several.

Those Who Held an Intelligent Disposer of Matter

Those who, allowing the eternity of matter, introduce an intelligent mind as the disposer thereof into the form the world now bears, may be again subdivided into two classes: one who, allowing no substance but matter, supposed it to be endued with understanding and life, and consequently to be God; and another, who held God and matter to be two distinct and independent beings. The first opinion, which, as has been said, differs but little from Spinozism, seems to have been that of Diogenes of Apollonia, and was certainly maintained by Hippasus of Metapontus, Heraclitus, and the Stoics.

Hippasus and Heraclitus held fire to be the first principle of which all things were made and into which, after the revolution of certain periods, they will be again resolved, and that this fire was God, whom Heraclitus described to be that most subtle and most swift substance which permeates or passes through the whole universe. The notions of Heraclitus seem to have been very confused, at least as they are now represented to us, which is no wonder at all, since he so much affected obscurity in what he wrote concerning natural philosophy that he was thence surnamed "the obscure." He is said to have denied the world to have been made either by gods or men, by which it is supposed he meant that the world was not made by any whatsoever after such a manner as an artificer makes a house, by machines and engines acting from without upon the matter, but by a certain inward plastic nature of its own. He asserted the fatal necessity of all things but taught that they were in a perpetual flux, nothing remaining at a stand. His account of the formation of the world was that the fire being extinguished, the grossest parts of it coalescing made the earth, which, being loosened by the fire, produced water, and from the exhalation of water, the air was generated. As the opinions of Heraclitus concerning the origin of things were adopted by the Stoics (of whom immediately), we shall not enlarge here, but only observe that the great physician Hippocrates had the same notion of the deity with Heraclitus, declaring his belief to be that heat or fire was immortal and omniscient, and that it saw, heard, and knew all things, both present and future.

The Stoics held two first principles: God and matter void of all quality, the one active and the other passive, and that they were both corporeal, for they did not acknowledge any such thing as incorporeal substance. By which means they strangely confounded themselves and reduced their two principles, in effect, to one and the same. They affirmed God to be an immortal, rational, and perfect animal, conscious of his own happiness, subject to no evil, governing the world and all things in it by his providence, and the architect and, as it were, the father of the universe. But they more usually described him to be a fiery spirit, void of all figure, yet changing himself into all things, or an artificial fire methodically proceeding to the generation of the world and containing within himself all seminal reasons or models according to which every thing is formed pursuant to fate, which is also their description of nature. This spirit, they say, quickens, sustains, and pervades the whole world and every part of it, as the soul does the human body, being called by several names according to the different form of the matter which it animates. For which reason, they hold the world itself to be God and every part of it a member of him.

So that this sect, in appearance, has confounded God and nature together, though their genuine doctrine seems to have been that there was not only an intellectual conscious soul presiding over the whole world, yet lodged more immediately in the fiery matter of it, but also a certain plastic or spermatic nature contained under or within the former, and which was properly the fate of all things. And the admitting of such a subordinate plastic nature or life, which acts in order to certain ends though without any sense or consciousness, has been thought very reasonable by some, though exploded by others, and that for the avoiding of these two consequences: either that, in the formation and organization of natural and animal bodies, every thing comes to pass fortuitously, for the sake of no final causes, and without the guidance and direction of any mind or understanding, to assert which seems irrational and atheistical; or else that God himself does immediately form every the minutest thing, as it were with his own hands, which is very indecent to suppose. There were some Stoics, it is true, who, rejecting all animality or consciousness in the world, made it to be governed by a vegetable or plastic nature only, as Boethus, whom we have already mentioned, in particular did; but their opinion ought by no means to be imputed to the whole sect.

As to the constitution of the world, the peculiar dogma of the Stoics, which Zeno, their master, seems to have borrowed from Heraclitus, was that in certain periods or alternate vicissitudes of time, the universe is dissolved by fire and re-produced out of it. God withdraws or absorbs all things into himself by a general conflagration and afterwards produces them out of himself again. In which successive conflagrations, they held that not only the world but all the inferior gods also are melted down into their supreme Deity, the intellectual fiery soul or principle of the universe, who, during that interval, rests in himself, considering his providence, and entertained with thoughts becoming himself, till he again emits and brings the world into being. The manner of which renovation Zeno thus describes: God, being alone, changes all substance from fire, first into air, and then into water; and as the seed is contained in the plant, so God, being the seminal reason of the world, left such a seed in the moisture as might afford proper matter for the generation of those things which were to be produced. That the grosser parts of this watery matter subsiding made the earth, the finer the air, and those still more subtilized the fire. The four elements being thus generated, from the mixture of them proceeded plants and animals and all other species.

Indian and Persian Doctrines

With these notions of the Stoics agrees the doctrine which is said to be almost universal among the Pandits (who are Indian gentiles) and secretly entertained by the Sufis and learned men of Persia, being the same in substance with the philosophy of Wujud, which Gassendi has taken the pains to refute. These Cabalists pretend that God, or the supreme, immovable, unchangeable Being, has not only produced the souls of creatures out of his own substance, but whatever is material or corporeal in the universe also. And that this production is not made simply in the way of efficient causes, but by an actual extraction or extension of his own substance, which is creation, as destruction is nothing else but the resuming of that divine substance into himself, which they illustrate by the following symbol. They feign that a certain immense spider was the first cause of all things, which, drawing the matter from its own bowels, wove the web of this universe and disposed it with wonderful art. She, in the meantime, sitting in the center of her work, feels and directs the motion of every part, till at length, when she has pleased herself sufficiently in ordering and contemplating this web, she draws all the threads she has spun out again into herself, and having absorbed them, the universal nature of all creatures vanishes into nothing. Another comparison made use of by them is that God is like an immense ocean wherein several phials full of water are swimming; that these phials, whithersoever they go, are always in the same ocean and in the same water, and when they break, the water contained in them will be united to their whole, that is, to the ocean, of which they are portions. But this last is by no means a strict parallel, for the matter of the phials is a second substance which, by its interposition, separates the water enclosed in those phials from the ocean. But if there was such a thing as a soul of the world, it would be expanded through all parts of the universe, nothing could hinder the union of every particular soul with its whole, nor would death be a means of their re-union.

Chinese and Siamese Doctrines

There is also a sect among the Chinese who acknowledge nature to be the sole deity, thereby understanding that natural power or operation which, being the efficient cause of motion and rest, produces, maintains, and preserves all things. They take her to be the soul which universally informs matter and call her a principle independent of all others. But as they separate this principle from all corporeal and sensible matter, its imperfections and definitions, they do in this particular differ something from the Stoics. Though they who incline to this sect do believe, as they did, that the world has had a beginning and shall have an end, but shall afterwards begin and end again as before, and so perpetually be renewed and perish. And according to this opinion, numerous worlds have already existed, and others, to an infinite number, will hereafter successively make room for one another.

But the opinion more commonly embraced at this time by the Chinese, and wherein the atheism which has so generally infected them consists, comes rather nearer to the Stoic doctrine, though not without some considerable differences. And it is this: That God is the material soul of the whole world, or rather only of its most excellent part, the heaven; and that his providence and power are finite and limited, though much excelling the prudence and power of man. That there are distinct spirits in the four parts of the world, the sun, stars, mountains, rivers, plants, cities, houses, and, in a word, in all things. Some of which spirits they suppose to be evil, making them the immediate cause of all the mischiefs and disasters to which human life is subject. By this distribution of souls throughout all nature, they are not at a loss to account for its whole economy and to supply the want of an almighty power and infinite providence, which they allow to no one spirit, not so much as to that of the heaven. They suppose, indeed, that the soul of the heaven acts on nature with a power and prudence incomparably greater than what man is endued with; but, at the same time, acknowledge in the soul of every other thing an inward power naturally independent on that of the heaven, and which sometimes acts even in contradiction to the designs of heaven. So that, according to them, the heaven governs nature as a mighty king; the other souls owe him obedience, which he almost always forces them to pay; yet there are some which now and then dispense with their duty in that respect and refuse to obey.

This last opinion differs widely from another entertained by a sect of the same nation and established by royal authority in the year of Christ 65. Its founder was the son of the king Iz Fan Vang, who was first named She, or She Kia, and afterwards, when he arrived at the age of thirty, Foe, that is, of a man. The secret doctrine of this sect, which is never discovered to the simple or vulgar, is that a void, or emptiness, is the principle and end of all things; that our first parents sprang from thence and on their death returned into it; and that all men are likewise resolved into that principle by death. That mankind and the elements and all creatures make a part of this void, so that there is but one substance in the universe, which is diversified in particular beings only by figures and qualities or interior configurations, in a manner as water, which is always essentially water, though it be in the shape of snow, hail, rain, or ice. They describe this original being as a pure, limpid, subtle, infinite substance which can neither be generated nor corrupted, but is both perfect itself and the perfection of all things, remaining in perpetual repose, but without heart, virtue, understanding, or power, the great property of its essence being neither to act, understand, nor will anything. This opinion is the fountain from whence that which we have mentioned to obtain among the Japanese is derived and differs from Spinozism in allowing an emersion of the world from a very different state to be possible, if not actually to have been. As it does both from that and the Stoic doctrine in divesting their first principle of activity and understanding. A follower of Confucius has refuted the extravagancies of this sect by that established maxim, "that nothing can be produced from nothing," by which he must have supposed that they taught the first principle of all things to be nothing, and consequently that the world had a beginning without either an efficient cause or matter. But it is more probable that by the words "void" and "emptiness," they intended only to express that which has not the properties of sensible matter and understand thereby what the moderns understand by space, which is conceived to be distinct from body and whose indivisible, impalpable, penetrable, immovable, and infinite extension is something real. It is easy to perceive that such a being could not be the first principle if it were inactive, as these Chinese philosophers pretend. Spinoza has not been so absurd; the abstract idea which he gives of the first principle is no more, properly speaking, than the idea of space, but then he endues it with motion, from whence all the varieties of matter may proceed.

The Siamese have also some agreement with the Stoics in their notion of the alternate destruction and renovation of the universe. The Talapoins teach that the figure or model of the world is eternal, but that the visible world is not. For whatever we see in it, lives, in their opinion, and must die, and there will at the same time be re-produced other beings of the same kind, another heaven, another earth, and other stars. And in this manner, they say, nature has perished and been renewed several times.

Nor was this doctrine unknown to the latter Jews, whose cabalists are supposed to account for the origin of things by making them emanations from a first cause and therefore pre-existent, though perhaps under another form. They speak also of the resuming or withdrawing of things into the first being by a revolution and restitution of them to their first state, as if they believed their En Soph, or first infinite Being, to contain all things, and that there is always the same quantity of Being in the universe, whether in the created or uncreated state. When it is in its uncreated or antemundane state, God is simply all things. But when it becomes the world, the degree or quantity of being or entity is not increased, but God expands and unfolds himself by emanations and effluxes from the superior to the lower parts, whereby the different forms and orders of created beings are constituted. For which reason, they often speak of greater and smaller vessels, as it were to receive those effluxes, and of effluent rays, and of canals through which they flow and are propagated. In a word, when God retracts those rays, the external world perishes, and all things again become God: He sendeth forth his spirit, and they are created, and he reneweth the face of the earth. He hideth his face, and they are troubled. He taketh away their breath, they die, and return to their dust.

The Opinion of Two Distinct, Co-eternal Principles

We come now to speak of those who held two distinct and independent principles co-existent from eternity: God and matter. This is supposed to have been the opinion of Pythagoras and Plato and was certainly that of Anaxagoras, Archelaus, and several others.

What was the opinion of Pythagoras’s master, Pherecydes of Syros, as to the origin of the world is somewhat uncertain. From the first words of a treatise of his extant in the time of Diogenes Laertius, which are indeed somewhat corrupted and obscure, it seems he believed three eternal beings: Jupiter, or God; Time; and the Earth. But Pythagoras himself is said to have asserted two substantial, self-existent principles: a Monad, or unity, and a Dyad, or duality. By the former of which, God, or an active principle or mind, is generally allowed to be meant (though some imagine the Pythagoric monads were atoms). But what the latter signified is uncertain, it being sometimes interpreted to be a demon or evil principle informing matter or the visible world, and at other times to be a passive principle or matter itself. The number two was used as a type to show the variety, inequality, divisibility, and continual changes of matter, as one was to express the unity, identity, indivisibility, and unchangeableness of the divine nature. Yet it may be questioned whether Pythagoras by his Dyad meant matter or not. For Porphyry thus interprets the two Pythagoric principles: The cause, says he, of that sympathy, harmony, and agreement which is in things, and of the conservation of the whole, which is always the same and like itself, was by Pythagoras called Unity, that unity which is in the things themselves being but a participation of the first cause. But the reason of difference, inequality, and constant irregularity in things was by him called a Dyad. Thus, according to Porphyry, by the Pythagoric dyad is not so much meant matter as the infinite and indeterminate nature and passive capability of things. So that the monad and dyad of Pythagoras seem to have been the same with Plato’s finite and infinite, the former of which two only is substantial, that first most simple being, the cause of all unity, and the measure of all things.

However, if Pythagoras’s dyad is to be understood of a substantial matter, there seems good reason to believe that he did not suppose matter to be self-existent and independent upon the Deity. Since, according to the best and most ancient writers, his dyad was no primary but a secondary being only, and derived from his monad, the sole original of all things, as matter for the monad or active principle, which in the beginning was alone, to work upon. For whatever Ocellus Lucanus, Philolaus, and some other Pythagoreans imagined of the world’s eternity, Pythagoras himself really believed it to have had a beginning and to have been made by God. This is confirmed by its being given as one reason for his superstitious abstinence from beans: that at the beginning, things being confounded, mingled, and putrefied together in the earth, the generation and secretion of them afterwards proceeded by degrees, animals being produced and plants shooting forth; at which time, from the same putrefied matter, sprang up both men and beans. But his acknowledging the creation of the world by God is still more express in those verses cited for his by Justin. We shall content ourselves to add here the testimony of St. Cyril, who assures us that he held one God of the whole universe, the principle and cause of all things, illuminating and quickening the whole, and the original of motion, from whom all things were derived and brought out of non-existence into being.

But Pythagoras, it seems, did not only call the supreme Deity a monad but also a tetrad, or tetractys, the explication of which has tortured the wits of several ages. It is, in the golden verses, said to be the fountain of the eternal nature, and, by Hierocles, the maker of all things, the intelligent god, the cause of the heavenly and sensible god, that is, of the animated world or heaven. The latter Pythagoreans endeavor to give reasons why God should be called Tetractys from certain mysteries in the number four. But the late conjecture of some learned men seems to be much more probable, that this name was really nothing else but the Tetragrammaton, or that proper name of the supreme God amongst the Hebrews consisting of four letters. Nor is it strange Pythagoras should be so well acquainted with the name Jehovah, since, besides his traveling into other parts of the east, he is affirmed by Josephus, Porphyry, and others to have conversed with the Hebrews also. The worst of Pythagoras’s theology was that, representing God as the mover of the universe and the soul of the world, he taught that our souls were portions of the divine substance.

That Pythagoras held numbers to be the principles of all things is testified by all antiquity, and he thence accounted for the production of the world in this manner. He supposed that the monad and dyad were the two sources of numbers, from whence proceeded points; from points, lines; from lines, plane figures; from planes, solids; from solids, sensible bodies, the elements of which are four—fire, water, earth, and air—and these are in perpetual change. From them, the world was formed, being animated, intelligent, and spherical, containing in the midst the earth, a globose body, and inhabited. He taught that the world began from fire and the fifth element, and that there being five figures of solid bodies, called mathematical or regular, the earth was made of the cube; fire of the pyramid or tetrahedron; the air of the octahedron; water of the icosahedron; and the sphere of the universe of the dodecahedron.

This method of philosophizing, which was also adopted by Plato, if understood in the literal acceptation, has no manner of foundation in nature, nothing being more certain than that numbers, if ever so variously combined, can generate nothing but numbers. It is therefore more probable that Pythagoras made use of them no otherwise than as emblems or symbols. For supposing mathematical sciences to possess a middle distance between corporeals and incorporeals, he began with them, thereby to wean the mind gradually from sensible things and raise it to the contemplation of intelligible beings. And this is the reason why he had recourse chiefly to numbers; for not being able to sufficiently explain by words the first principles, he represented them by numbers. This seems to be all Pythagoras designed, though his followers have sought mysteries in his doctrine which himself never dreamt of. Yet it is not to be denied that the great defect of that philosopher and of Plato also was that they resolved natural things into mathematical reasons, numbers, and proportions, as Aristotle afterwards did into logical reasons.

The monad, dyad, and tetrad we have already spoken of. As to the regular bodies, it is conjectured that Pythagoras intended only to represent the elements under their forms, in imitation of other natural bodies. Thus he represented fire by the figure of a pyramid or tetrahedron, from its aspiring to a point or the acuteness of its flame; the air, being next in order to the fire, by an octahedron, which bears the nearest resemblance to the tetrahedron, being composed of two pyramids joined by a square base; water, because of its fluidity, was represented by an icosahedron; and the earth by a cube, to denote its stability, the cube being of all the regular bodies the least adapted to motion. Or if they were to be considered physically, perhaps Pythagoras supposed the constituent parts of the four elements to consist of such figures according to their several specific gravities: that the mole or primary particles of the earth were cubes, for as the earth is the most ponderous of all the elements, so is the cube the heaviest of all the regular bodies; that the particles of fire were tetrahedra or triangular pyramids, fire being the lightest and most volatile element, as the tetrahedron is the lightest of the same bodies; that the particles of the air had the form of an octahedron, which is the next lightest body of the five, as air is the next lightest to fire; and that the particles of water had the shape of an icosahedron, which figure is a sort of mean proportion between the cube and the octahedron, as the weight of water is between the weight of air and that of earth. As to the fifth body, the dodecahedron, which represents the heaven or sphere of the universe, it must be entirely emblematical (if it is not rather a later addition to the Pythagorean physiology and no genuine part of it), the twelve faces of that figure being fancied to allude to the twelve signs of the zodiac, or else the four elements, seven heavens, and the firmament.

Timaeus Locrus, who was a Pythagorean, seems to have held the pre-existence of matter as if it were a self-existent principle together with God, for he affirms it to be eternal. Yet, in another place, he asserts the eternal God, who is visible to the understanding only, to be the author and parent of all things, and that the world, which is visible to our eyes, is the generated god. He distinguishes between the eternal duration of God, which had no beginning, and time, which was made together with the world as an imitation of eternity. He taught more particularly that there were two principles of all things: Mind, the principle of those things which are made according to reason, and Necessity, of those which are produced by force according to the powers of bodies. By which second principle, he plainly means matter. He taught that before the making of the world, there were, besides God, idea or form, and rude matter; one being the intelligible pattern or exemplar of all things, and the other the subject, which, being itself without figure yet capable of all figures, was reduced by God into the determinate form of the visible world. Which, being the best production, is not corruptible by any other cause than the same God who composed it, if it shall at any time please him to dissolve it. So that Timaeus seems really to have held two subordinate principles, matter and form, wherein Archytas the Tarentine, who was also a Pythagorean, agreed with him, as supposing God to be the artificer and mover, matter that which is moved, and form the art introduced into the matter, which was also the notion of Plato. We the rather take notice of the opinion of Archytas in this place because he and Pythagoras are joined by Censorinus with Ocellus Lucanus as believing mankind to have been from eternity.

Plato, who, as well as his master Socrates, embraced the Pythagorean notions as to the origin of the universe, held the three principles we have just mentioned: God, matter, and idea. These are by Laertius reduced to two: God and matter, the ideas or original patterns of things conceived in the divine mind being really no distinct principle from him, but the very mind of God, with whom they are often confounded, both by him and several of the Platonics. It seems therefore certain that Plato supposed matter to have been uncreated and eternal, as he often asserts it to be. But he has been defended in this respect by Hierocles who, being himself convinced by the arguments on the other side, was willing to have it thought, for the honor of his sect, that its founder believed God capable of producing the world by a simple act of volition, though there was no pre-existent matter, and therefore maintained that he really held an absolute creation out of nothing. Wherein Hierocles is thought to have been very singular. And yet some moderns have followed him in that particular, supposing that when Plato asserted matter to be eternal, he did not mean that it subsisted visibly from all eternity, but only that it subsisted intellectually in the eternal idea of God. And several passages have been cited from the works of that philosopher which would give some grounds to suspect he really believed that God created or produced matter itself, as well as made and formed the world thereout, had he not so explicitly declared the contrary. Another opinion imputed to Plato by Plutarch, namely, the supposing of two intelligent and independent principles, a good and an evil one, will be considered by and by.

As to the formation of the world, Plato taught that matter being at first unformed and without any determinate figure, and being moved in an irregular and disorderly manner, God, who prefers order to confusion, gathered it together. And converting this substance into the four elements, of them he made the world and all things therein, fashioning it according to the archetypal idea or model thereof which he had conceived in himself. He gave it a spherical figure, as the most perfect and that which contains the rest, and endued it with an intelligent soul because an animated being is more excellent than an inanimate, which soul of the world Plato supposed to be formed before its material body. He also asserted the world to be incorruptible, not by its nature, but because it is supported by divine providence. He held not only the animated universe itself, but the several parts of nature, which he likewise supposed animated, to be gods, inferior indeed to the supreme God but superior to men, and justly challenging honor and worship from them. These gods of Plato were for the most part fiery, being the celestial bodies, though he supposed the earth also to be a god, affirming it to be the oldest of all the gods within the heaven. And for this reason, he found fault with the Anaxagorean doctrine, which made the planets and stars nothing but inanimate stones and earth.

Anaxagoras, who was not more conspicuous for his wealth and nobility of birth than the greatness of his mind, did indisputably hold two co-eternal principles: God and matter. He was the first (of the Ionic philosophers at least) who, as has been observed, introduced an intelligent being to move, separate, and put in order the chaotic matter, whence he obtained the honorable surname of Nous, or Mind. He admitted as many sorts of principles as of compounded bodies, for he supposed that every kind of body was formed of a great number of small similar particles; that a bone, for example, was nothing but a composition of many invisible bones, and that the blood which we see was made up of many minute drops, every one of which was blood. From the similitude of which principles, he called them Homoeomeriae. But this obliged him to allow that the seeds or principles of all kinds are found in every body, which throws his system into a strange confusion, not to mention several other inconveniences and contradictions therein. As to the formation of the world, his doctrine seems to have been that the mind or intelligence who presided thereat, and whom he allows to be the original of motion, finding in the infinite matter a vast number of particles which were like one another but promiscuously mixed with and surrounded by others which were unlike, separated the one from the other and, joining together the corpuscles of the same kind, formed of some a star, of others a stone, etc. Notwithstanding which, he has been severely censured by several as allowing too much to material necessity and endeavoring to account for things as far as possible from the inherent forms and qualities of matter only, or any way rather than bring in the Deity, to whom he never has recourse but when he is absolutely at a loss and without whose interposition or knowledge, he admitted, some revolutions in nature happened. As to the formation of animals, he taught that they proceeded from the earth, being first generated of moisture and heat, and after by mixture of the sexes.

Archelaus, the successor of Anaxagoras, most probably held the same principles with his master, namely, an infinite number of similar particles, as St. Augustine and Simplicius testify, though others tell us that he supposed infinite air, its rarefaction and condensation (the one being fire and the other water) to be the principles of all things. He also thought men and animals were produced by the heat of the earth, which yielded a slimy substance like milk, serving for food.

Empedocles, who was an auditor both of Pythagoras and Anaxagoras, is said to have followed the physiology of the latter. He held two causes of all things: contention and friendship, meaning thereby secretion and concretion, or the separation and mixture of the primary matter, from which the elements were formed, and all things that have been, are, or shall be—plants, animals, men, and gods—derived their original. Yet he supposed that contention and friendship did both depend on one supreme Deity as their author. For Empedocles, it seems, believed that were it not for discord or contention, all things would be one, so that, according to him, all things whatsoever proceeded from contention together with a mixture of friendship, save only the supreme God, who has no contention at all in him because he is essentially unity itself. He taught that the elements were composed out of smaller corpuscles, which were most minute and, as it were, the elements of the elements. Agreeably to other atomists, he acknowledged no generation or corruption, properly so called, but ascribed all to secretion and concretion. He imagined the elements to have been produced in this order: first, that the ether was secreted, afterwards the fire, and then the earth, which being too closely pressed by violence of the circumvolution, there issued thence water, from the evaporation of which proceeded the air. That the heaven was made of the ether, the sun of the fire, and the things about the earth from the other elements. So that the physiology of Empedocles was, at the bottom, the same with that of Democritus and Epicurus, only that he differed from them in some particulars, as in excluding a vacuum and denying such physical corpuscles as were indivisible, but chiefly in admitting an intelligent principle by whose wisdom the world was put into this order, as the best and most convenient for the good of the whole, though he sometimes indulged too much to fortuitous mechanism, especially in the structure of animals. We shall only observe further that he held, according to the Pythagorean doctrine, that there were two worlds: the one intellectual and the other sensible, the former of them being the model or archetype of the latter.

That Plutarch maintained the eternity of matter is past all question; he expressly asserts that the substance or matter out of which the world was made was not itself made but always ready at hand and subject to the artificer to be ordered and disposed by him. For, in his opinion, the making of the world was not the production of it out of nothing but out of an antecedent bad and disorderly state, like the making of a house, garment, or statue.

It is also well known that Hermogenes and other ancient pretenders to Christianity did in like manner assert the self-existence and improduction of matter, for which reason they were commonly called Materiarians. They endeavored by this means to give an account (as the Stoics had done before them) of the original of evils and to free God from the imputation thereof. And they argued in this manner: God made all things either out of himself, or out of nothing, or out of pre-existent matter. He could not make all things out of himself because himself being always unmade, he should then really have been the maker of nothing. And he did not make all out of nothing because, being essentially good, he would have made every thing in the best manner, and so there could have been no evil in the world. But since there are evils, and these could not proceed from the will of God, they must needs arise from the fault of something, and therefore of the matter out of which things were made. Some modern sects of the Christian profession do also at this day assert the uncreatedness of matter, but these suppose, as the Stoics did, body to be the only substance.

But some went still farther and maintained that the chaos or original matter was animated by an evil or maleficent soul, thereby constituting a third self-existent principle. And this was the opinion of Plutarch, whom we have just mentioned, and of Numenius and Atticus. The first not only expressly asserts that a mad, irrational soul and an unformed, disorderly body did co-exist with one another from eternity, neither of them having any generation or beginning, but discovers no small fondness for this notion in several parts of his works and professedly endeavors to establish it by the best arguments he can, pretending that otherwise it would be impossible to account in a satisfactory manner for the original of evil. For as evil could not be produced without some positive cause, it being ridiculous to imagine it came into the world by accident, and as neither God, who is essentially good, nor mere inactive matter, void of all form and quality, could be the cause of evil, he therefore concluded that it must proceed from a certain irrational and maleficent soul or demon, unmade and co-existing with God and matter from eternity. So that whatever is good in the soul and body of the universe, and likewise in the souls of men and demons, is to be ascribed to God as its only original, and whatever is evil, irregular, and disorderly in them ought to be imputed to that other substantial evil principle.

And to support this opinion by authority as well as reason, he would persuade us that it was the constant belief of all the pagan nations and of the wisest men and philosophers that ever were among them. He imputes it to the Egyptians, who, as he imagines, represented the evil principle under the name of Typhon; to Zoroaster and the Persian Magi, who are also by Laertius affirmed to have maintained two principles, a good demon and an evil one (though it has been questioned whether they really believed the evil principle to be eternal or not); to the Chaldeans, because their astrologers supposed two of the planets to be beneficent, two maleficent, and three of a middle nature; and to the ancient Greeks, because they sacrificed not only to Jupiter Olympius but also to Hades or Pluto, who was sometimes called by them the infernal Jupiter. He also supposed the monad and dyad of Pythagoras, the contention and friendship of Empedocles, the mind and infinite matter of Anaxagoras to be no other than a good and evil God.

But above all, he endeavors to prove that Plato was an undoubted champion for this opinion, and that chiefly for these reasons: first, because that philosopher speaks of a necessary and innate appetite which may sometimes turn the heavens a contrary way and by that means cause disorder and confusion; secondly, because he speaks of two kinds of souls, whereof one is beneficent but the other the contrary; and lastly, because he supposes the matter to have been moved disorderly before the world was made, which implies there was a disorderly and irrational soul existing with it as the mover of it, matter being unable to move itself. But as to the first of these allegations, it has been observed that Plato, as if it had been purposely to prevent such an interpretation of his meaning in the passage there quoted as this of Plutarch’s, adds that it must not be supposed there are two gods of contrary minds turning the heavens sometimes one way and sometimes another. Which might also serve for an answer to what is afterwards urged, as if Plato had affirmed that there were two souls, the one beneficent and the other the contrary, because this would be all one as to introduce two gods. But in that place, it is conceived that Plato did only distribute souls in general into good and evil; those moral differences properly belonging to that rank of beings called by him souls and arising from them, according to his premised doctrine that soul is the cause of good and evil, just and unjust. But then, afterwards making enquiry concerning the soul of the world or heaven, he positively concludes that it was no other than a soul endued with all virtue. As to the last reason, that matter is said by Plato to have been moved disorderly, it is supposed that he did therein only adhere to that vulgarly received tradition that the world was formed from a chaos, or matter confusedly moved, and afterwards brought into order. And as to the origin of evil, Plato is conceived neither to have imputed it to God himself nor derived it from unqualified matter, nor yet from any irrational and maleficent soul, but from the necessity of imperfection. Some mongrel Christians, as the Marcionites, Manicheans, and Paulicians, did really maintain this opinion of two self-existent gods, a good and an evil one, which latter Manes called Hyle, or matter.

The Opinion That the World Had a Beginning

Having now done with the second of those opinions, under which we comprehended the several notions which have been entertained concerning the origin of the universe, we come to speak of the last and only true one: that the world had a beginning, being absolutely produced by God out of a state of non-existence, and consequently that it is of its own nature liable to dissolution. And besides such of the nations and philosophers already mentioned who most probably believed this creation of the world, though suspected of contrary opinions, there were several among the heathens who unquestionably did so.

We shall first instance in the ancient Tuscans or Etrurians, whose tradition we have from one of their own writers. He says that God, the author of the universe, employed twelve thousand years in all his creations and distributed them into twelve houses. That in the first chiliad, or thousand years, he made the heaven and earth; in the next, the firmament which appears to us, calling it heaven; in the third, the sea and all the waters that are in the earth; in the fourth, the great lights, the sun and moon, and also the stars; in the fifth, every volatile, reptile, and four-footed animal, in the air, earth, and water; in the sixth, man. It seems therefore, according to them, that the first six thousand years were passed before the formation of man, and that mankind are to continue for the other six thousand years, the whole time of consummation being twelve thousand years. For they held that the world was subject to certain revolutions wherein it became transformed and a new age and generation began. Of such generations there were in all, according to them, eight, differing from one another in customs and way of life, each having a duration of a certain number of years assigned them by God and determined by the period which they called the great year. The approach of such a change in the world was judged by the Tuscan diviners to be portended by a prodigy which happened in the time of C. Marius, when the air being perfectly clear and serene, there was heard a shrill and mournful sound of a trumpet, to the astonishment and terror of everybody. And these are all the remains we now have of the old Etrurian physiology, which may be supposed to have been well worth our knowledge, that nation being particularly curious and diligent in their enquiries into nature. Besides those we have already mentioned who entertained this opinion of the mundane revolutions, the Druids also taught the alternate dissolution of the world by water and fire and its successive renovation.

The Magi among the ancient Persians also acknowledged the world to have been created by God, as their successors most certainly do at this day. But being at a loss otherwise to account for the original of evil, they held two principles: a good demon or God, and an evil one; the first the author of all good, and the other of all evil. The former they supposed to be represented by light and the latter by darkness, as their truest symbols, and that of the composition of these two all things in the world are made. The good principle or God they named Yazad or Yazdan, and Ohrmazd or Hormizd, which the Greeks wrote Oromazes; and the evil demon they called Ahriman, and the Greeks Arimanius. Intending in the proper place to give a more particular detail of the ancient religion of the Magi and their several tenets, true or supposed, we shall only observe here that though one sect of them held, as the Manicheans and some other heretics did, both these principles to have been from all eternity, yet they are reputed heterodox. The original doctrine was that the good principle or God only was eternal and the other created, which appears not only from the unanimous testimony of the eastern writers but from what genuine remains we have of Zoroaster in the Greek, particularly the following description of the supreme Deity taken from the very words of Zoroaster himself: "God," says he, "has the head of a hawk (which must be a symbolical expression) and is the first of all things, incorruptible, eternal, unmade, without parts, unlike any other being, the promoter of all good, impartial, the best of the good, the most prudent of the prudent; he is the father of equity and justice, self-instructed, natural, perfect, and wise, and the sole inventor of what is holy in nature." And, indeed, that the evil demon was not believed to be self-existent appears from what Plutarch himself, though he so confidently affirms the contrary, says of his future destruction, it being impossible that what is uncreated should ever be destroyed.

That writer gives the following account of the Magian traditions in relation to their gods and the introduction of evil into the world, namely, that Oromazes consisted of most pure light and Arimanius of darkness, and that they were at war with each other. That Oromazes created six gods: the first the author of benevolence, the second of truth, the third of justice, the others of wisdom, riches, and the pleasure which attends good actions; and that Arimanius made as many who were the authors of the opposite evils or vices. That then Oromazes, triplicating himself, removed as far from the sun as the sun is from the earth and adorned the heaven with stars, appointing the dog-star for their guardian and leader. That he also created twenty-four other gods and enclosed them in an egg; but Arimanius having also made an equal number, these last perforated the egg, by which means evil and good became mixed together. However, the fatal time will come when Arimanius, the introducer of plagues and famine, must be of necessity utterly destroyed by the former and annihilated. Then the earth being made plain and even, mankind shall live in a happy state, in the same manner, in the same political society, and using one and the same language. Theopompus writes that, according to the Magians, the said two gods, during the space of three thousand years, alternately conquer and are conquered; that for other three thousand years, they will wage mutual war, fight, and destroy the works of each other, till at last Hades (or the evil spirit) shall perish and men become perfectly happy, their bodies needing no food nor casting any shadow. That God, who contrives this scene of things, rests and reposes himself for a certain season, which is not long to him but like the intermission of sleep to men.

The modern Persians have a peculiar tradition which they pretend to have received from Zoroaster, that God created the world not in six natural days but in six times or spaces of different length, called in their tongue Gahanbars, and making in all three hundred and sixty-five days, or a year complete. As to the several names of which, their order, number of days, and the several parts of the creation performed therein respectively, all authors agree, though they differ as to the particular part of the year from which they begin. Their names and order are as follow:

1. The first time is called Mid-yuzeram and contains the space of fifty-five days, in which the heavens were created.
2. The second is Mid-yusham or Mid-yushaham, of sixty days; in this the waters were created.
3. The third, Paitishahim or Paitishahim-gah, consists of seventy-five days, wherein the earth was created.
4. The fourth is Ayathrem or Ayathrem, of thirty days, in which the trees and plants were created.
5. The fifth is Maidyarem, containing eighty days, in which space the animals were created.
6. The sixth, Hamaspathmaidyem, was that wherein man was created, being seventy-five days.

Indian and Chinese Traditions

The old Indian philosophers, called by the Greeks Brachmanes, held that the world was generated or made and also perishable, being subject to successive dissolutions and renovations. They taught that the principles of all things were different, but the formation of the world commenced from water, and that the cause of God’s making all things was his essential goodness. And these are also the sentiments of the modern Brahmins, their successors. But the particulars of their doctrines are related by different authors with a variety not easy to reconcile, the occasion of which has been partly the reservedness of the Brahmins, who are extremely shy of conversing with strangers or making them the least discoveries, but more the relators' want of skill in their language.

Their tradition, as delivered by one writer, is that the great God, being alone and intending to manifest his goodness and power, consulted with himself about the creation of the universe and, as the groundwork of this mighty frame, made four elements, which were at first confusedly mingled together, but the Almighty separated them in the following manner. First, by some great cane or like instrument, he blew upon the waters, which arose into a bubble of a round form like an egg, which spreading itself farther and farther, made the clear and transparent firmament that encompasses the world. After this, of the remaining water and its sediment, God made a round ball, which he called the lower world; the solid part whereof became the earth, and the more fluid the sea, both making one globe, which, by a great noise or humming sound, he placed in the midst of the firmament. Then he created the sun and moon in the firmament to distinguish times and seasons. And thus the elements became separated and assigned to their proper places and began to perform their offices, the air filling up all interstices, the fire nourishing by its heat, and the earth and sea bringing forth the living creatures proper to each. And to these God imparted a seminal virtue that they might be fruitful, and thus was the world created.

God having thus made the world, he then created man as a creature more worthy than the rest, whom the earth at God’s command produced from its bowels, his head first appearing and afterwards the other parts of his body, into which God infused life and afterwards made him a companion, which was a woman, resembling him more in mind and disposition than outward shape. The first man’s name was Purusha and the woman’s Prakriti, whose descendants being, for their wickedness, destroyed by a deluge, God afterwards created three persons of greater perfection, called Brahma, Vishnu, and Rudra, to each of whom he gave a different office and power: to the first, that of creating or producing men or other animals; to the second, that of preserving and feeding them; and to the last, that of destroying them, which charges they severally executed in the manner that shall be related in a more proper place.

Another tells us that the Brahmins acknowledge one sole and supreme God but are not perfectly agreed which of their gods he is; one sect affirming him to be Vishnu, another Ishvara, and a third holding Vishnu and Ishvara to be one and the same. They all teach, however, that his first and most ancient production was a secondary god named Brahma, whom the supreme God formed out of a flower which floated on the great deep before the creation of the world, and that God afterwards, on account of Brahma’s virtue, gratitude, and fidelity, gave him power to create the universe.

But the Protestant missionaries lately sent to the coast of Coromandel have given accounts somewhat different from the preceding, and which yet may perhaps deserve more regard, as written by men who were not unacquainted with the Malabarian tongue. In one of their letters, it is said that the Malabarians (who are one of those nations which follow the religion of the Brahmins) own but one divine Being, the spring and original source of all other gods and things, called by them Isparetta, which in their language imports as much as a Deity. This Isparetta, they say, before anything was created, transformed himself into an egg, out of which the whole system of heaven and earth and all things contained therein were afterwards produced. From this divinity, as their tradition runs, did originally spring something which they call Kiwelinga, and which they worship in their temples as a god. From this Kiwelinga, three other great gods took their rise: Brahma, Vishnu, and Ishvara. Brahma is said to create and make all things; Vishnu to rule over things created; and Ishvara to destroy them again.

In another letter, we are told the supreme Being is called Parabara Vastu, who, as the Indians believe, does not concern himself immediately about things of small moment but, having created some other great gods as his vicegerents, he by them moves and influences the world and all creatures contained therein. These gods have again their subordinate gods who have their particular stations and government of things assigned them. The theogony or gradual production of which gods is described in the following series: 1. The Being of all beings, or the supreme God, created eternity. 2. Eternity brought forth Tishiven. 3. By this Tishiven, the goddess Thaddy was created. 4. The goddess Thaddy produced Putadi, or the elementary and sensitive world. 5. By Putadi, a sound or ringing was generated. 6. The sound’s offspring was nature. 7. Nature afterwards begot the great god Shatatshiven. 8. Which last again produced another great god called Mageshurn. 9. From Mageshurn sprang Ruddiren or Ishuren. 10. From Ruddiren, the great god Vishnum. 11. This last created Bruma. 12. Bruma was the productive principle of the soul. 13. The soul at length created the heaven, or that vast expansion between heaven and earth which makes up the fifth element, according to their philosophy, or rather the receptacle of the other four elements. 14. The heaven begat the air. 15. The air begat the fire. 16. The fire begat the water. 17. And the water the earth. Besides a tedious genealogy of other gods and prophets, carried to a great length. They acknowledge their inferior gods to be subject to various changes as well as the creatures themselves and that each of them has his fixed term of life and government allotted him. After the expiration of all which determined times, every thing shall return to the Being of all beings, and there shall follow a new creation. As to the creation of man, they say that sixty thousand men were created at first, but that half of them turned devils soon after, and the other half remained men, both of them being, in process of time, multiplied to infinite numbers.

Though the Chinese have, for some time past, been generally infected with the impious opinions which have been taken notice of, it is however certain that before idolatry prevailed in China, they acknowledged one God, or supreme, eternal, omnipotent spirit, the lord of heaven and earth, and the governor and director of all things, whom they worshipped under the name of Shangti. But this opinion now obtains with very few, and those of the better sorts. These hold that a chaos was the beginning of things, from which God produced and formed whatsoever is material in the universe. But this they distinguish into two principles, which they call Yin and Yang. Yin signifies hidden or imperfect; Yang revealed or perfect. Which two principles by combination produce four images or signs, which seem to represent the four elements, whence proceed eight forms or symbols. And these represent certain general things whereon the generation and corruption of all things depend, being the heaven, the earth, thunder, mountains, fire, clouds, waters, and wind, which again, mutually combined, produce sixty-four symbols, completing, as it were, the number of the universe, concerning which they have much mysterious learning. They say the heaven was first perfected, then the earth, after which genii or spirits were produced, and then mankind. And that the first man, whom they call Puoncu, was generated from the chaos, as from an egg, the shell of which became the heaven, the white the air, and the yolk the earth. Others say he came out of a certain desert, but that his original is unknown.

They divide the period wherein the world was created and will be destroyed, as they do their natural day, into twelve hours or times, consisting each of ten thousand eight hundred years. The twelfth hour, or at midnight, the heaven was made; the earth, the first hour after midnight; and man, the second. Their emperor Yao was created the sixth hour, or at noon; and the age wherein we now live is the seventh hour (though some count a much larger number of years from the beginning of the world). The ninth hour, they say, there will be a great disorder and confusion of all things, cruel wars, commotions in kingdoms, and public calamities, till all things return to the chaos whence they first proceeded.

There are also some, even among the Japanese, who acknowledge this truth of the creation of the world and entertain a much more noble idea of their god Amida than the generality of them do. For they say he is invisible, distinct from the nature of the elements, and existing before the creation of heaven and earth, without beginning or end; that by him all things were created, his essence passing through heaven and earth and beyond them, being limited to no place, and governing and preserving all things; that he is immovable, incorporeal, without any visible accident whereby he may be seen by the bodily eyes; and this god they hold in great reverence as the perpetual fountain of all good.

Several nations in America also entertained the same belief of a creation, of which some instances might be given. But their opinions containing little that is curious as to the original of things, we have, to avoid prolixity, chosen to omit them.

Some of the accounts we have given above will, no doubt, be taken by the generality of readers to be very absurd and ridiculous. But before they pass an absolute judgment, they are desired to consider the imperfection of philosophy in those early times, and that the ancients, as well Greeks as Barbarians, wrapped up and concealed their true doctrines, particularly those concerning the origin of things, under the veils of symbols, enigmas, and mystical allegories. For which reason, many things in the preceding accounts which may seem strange and fabulous will not perhaps deserve to be treated with all the contempt they must needs meet with from those who understand them in the obvious and literal sense. Nor, perhaps, is it possible for us at this distance of time to give any tolerable explications of them; and therefore, omitting such disquisitions, we have confined ourselves to the bare historical narration.

The Mosaic Account of the Creation

And now we come to the only authentic and genuine history of the creation, which has been left us by Moses and carries with it all the marks of truth and probability, even though it be regarded only as a human composition and separate from divine authority. And it is to this purpose:

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. The earth, after its immediate creation, was for some time a promiscuous, dark, fluid, and unformed chaos, or mass of matter, which God, in the space of six days, disposed and reduced into the present form of the world. His spirit moved or brooded over the surface of the water, or fluid matter, to influence and actuate the same.

1. First Day: The first thing that appeared was light. The separation of which from the darkness was the work of the first day.
2. Second Day: Then God made an expansion in the midst of the waters to divide the waters above from the waters below, which expansion Moses calls heaven. And this was the second day’s work.
3. Third Day: On the third day, God caused the earth to be drained and the waters to be gathered together, chiefly into one great receptacle or the ocean, whereupon the dry land appeared. After which, the earth produced all sorts of plants, herbs, and trees, bearing their several seeds and fruits according to their various kinds.
4. Fourth Day: The fourth day, God made the sun and moon and placed them in the heaven to illuminate the earth, to distinguish between day and night, and divide the several seasons of the year. The stars were also made this day.
5. Fifth Day: The fifth day, God created all the fishes and inhabitants of the waters, and also the fowls of the air, which were likewise produced out of the water.
6. Sixth Day: On the sixth day, God made all the terrestrial animals: the cattle, creeping things, and beasts of the field. And last of all, he created man, forming his body of the dust of the earth and animating him with a living soul. And out of the man, he made the woman, taking her out of his side, having first cast him into a profound sleep.

This is the substance of what Moses has delivered concerning the creation of the world, which, being short and rather suited to the capacities of the people he designed to instruct than written for the satisfaction of a philosophic enquirer, has left room for various explications and the setting up of several very different hypotheses.

It may be expected we should say something of the hypothesis of Mr. Des Cartes, though he has endeavored rather to form a fine system of his own than to explain the Mosaical description and reconcile it with philosophy. He agrees with Epicurus in making matter and motion the principles of nature, supposing, however, the being of a God who both created the matter and impressed the first motion upon it. But then, after this motion once begun and the wheels set a-going, he leaves this vast machine to the laws of mechanism, which affect all things, both celestial and terrestrial, without any farther assistance from the first impressor, after the following manner.

He supposes:

1. That the matter of which the world is composed, being at first of one uniform nature and infinitely divisible, was actually divided into many particles of a moderate size, which had all such a motion as is now found in the world.
2. That all these particles were not at first spherical because many such little globes joined together will not fill up a continued space; but that, of whatever figure they were at first, by their continual motion and frequent collisions against each other, their angles would be cut off, and they would become spherical.
3. He asserts that there is no space left empty, and therefore, when these round particles, by being joined together, leave some intervals between them, he supposes that there are other lesser particles arising from those angles that were cut off. These, by the force and celerity of their motion, will be divided into innumerable still less fragments, proper to fill up all the interstices.
4. He supposes that some of these fragments taken from the angles of the spherical particles will necessarily have very angular figures and, on that account, being not so fit for motion, will be apt to stick together and transfer a great part of their motion to such particles as are less and consequently move swifter.

These things being supposed, he proceeds to the formation of the world from his three elements, which consist of the three sorts of particles above-mentioned. The first element, which is the subtle matter cut off from the angles of the greater particles, is that of the sun and fixed stars and is susceptible of a much quicker motion than the other two. The second element consists of the spherical particles themselves, of which the heavens were made. The third element consists of those angular particles which are less adapted to motion, and thence proceeded the earth, planets, comets, and other appearances of nature.

He supposes that the solar system is a vortex continually whirling round, whose matter (excepting the earth and planets) is very liquid and transparent, consisting altogether of the first and second elements and containing a greater quantity of the first than is sufficient to fill up the spaces between the particles of the second. And since all bodies which move circularly endeavor to recede from the center of their motion, and the more thick and solid parts, such as the particles of the second element, are obliged to fly off with a greater force than the rest, the particles of the second element must necessarily recede from the common center and approach one another as much as their figure and motion will permit. After their interstices therefore are filled up, the remaining matter of the first element takes the place left by the second, by which means a mass or heap of the matter of the first element settles and is formed in the midst of the vortex, which mass we call the sun. Every one of the fixed stars he supposes likewise to be a sun and the center of a vortex. He supposes that the earth was originally such a star, whose vortex was adjoining to that of the sun, but by degrees it was covered over or incrusted with spots arising on its surface like the scum on a boiling pot. This still increasing and growing thicker and thicker, the star lost its light and activity, and consequently the motion of the celestial vortex about it grew more weak, languid, and unable to resist the vigorous encroachments of the neighboring vortex of the sun. It was at last drawn in and wholly absorbed by it and forced to comply with its motion and make one in the choir of the sun’s satellites.

But this hypothesis is liable to several objections, and some which absolutely ruin it. The three elements of Des Cartes, and particularly the subtle matter of the first, have been shown to be imaginary, and his vortices fictitious and repugnant to the nature of things. His supposition of a plenum is also evidently false, not to mention the absurdities which follow his making of matter and space or extension to be the same. However, we cannot but think the essay of that philosopher, who endeavored to account for the formation of the world in a certain time from a rude matter by the sole continuation of a motion once impressed and reduced to a few simple and general laws, or of others who have since attempted the same with more applause from the original properties of matter with which it was endued at its creation, is so far from being criminal or injurious to God, as some have imagined, that it is rather giving a more sublime idea of his infinite wisdom.

We cannot therefore excuse ourselves from representing the theories of two very learned men of our age and nation; one of whom has excelled in the richness of his style and fancy, and the other in the strength of parts and contrivance.

Dr. Burnet's Theory

The former of them, Dr. Burnet, omitting to speak of the original of the universe or even of the solar system as made long before the Mosaic creation, confines himself to the formation of the earth only, which he supposes to be done from a chaos or confused mass consisting of the principles of all terrestrial bodies in this manner. He supposes that the first change that would happen would be that the heaviest and grossest parts would sink downwards towards the middle of the mass (for there he supposes the center of its gravity) and, being more and more compressed, would harden by degrees and constitute the interior parts of the earth. That the rest of the mass which swam above would also be divided, by the same principle of gravity, into two orders of bodies: the one liquid, like water, the other volatile, like air. For the more fine and active parts, disentangling themselves by degrees from the rest, would mount above them and, having motion enough to keep them on the wing, would play in those open places where they constitute that body we call air. That the other parts, being grosser than these and having a more languid motion, could not fly up separate from one another but settled in a mass together under the air, upon the body of the earth, composing not only water strictly so called but the whole mass of liquid bodies belonging to the earth.

He continues that there being two chief kinds of terrestrial liquors—those that are oily and light, and those that are lean and more earthy, like common water, which naturally separate from one another when they come to settle—the more oily and light part of this mass would consequently get above the other and swim upon it. He proceeds to suppose that the air was as yet thick, gross, and dark, there being abundance of terrestrial particles swimming in it after the grossest were sunk down, which by their weight made their way more speedily. That the lesser and lighter which remained would sink too, but more slowly and in a longer time, so as in their descent they would meet with that oily liquor upon the face of the deep, or upon the watery mass, which would entangle and stop them from passing any further. Whereupon, mixing there with that unctuous substance, they composed a certain slime or fat, soft, and light earth, spread upon the face of the waters. That this thin and tender orb of earth increased still more and more as the little earthy parts that were detained in the air could make their way to it. Some having a long journey from the upper regions, and others being very light, would float up and down a long while before they could disengage themselves and descend. But at length, being all got thither and mingling more and more with that oily liquor, they sucked it all up and were wholly incorporated together, and so began to grow more stiff and firm, making both but one substance, which was the first concretion or firm and consistent substance that rose upon the face of the chaos and became at last a habitable earth, such as nature designed it. And such a body as this, he doubts not, would answer all the purposes of a rising world. For what can be a more proper seminary for plants and animals than a soil of this temper and composition? A finer and lighter sort of earth, mixed with a benign juice, easy and obedient to the action of the sun or what other causes were employed by the author of nature for the production of things in the new-made earth, and perfectly answering the ancient descriptions of the primigenial soil or slime.

The form of this first earth, both external and internal, is easily conceived from the manner of its formation. As to the external form, it would be smooth, regular, and uniform, without mountains and without a sea. The internal form would consist of several regions involving one another like orbs about the same center, or the several elements cast circularly about each other, the water being entirely contained under the upper crust of the earth, which formed a wonderful vault hanging above the deep, sustained by nothing but its own measures and manner of construction.

To confirm so new and surprising a representation of the form of the first earth, and to prove it must have been different from the present, he endeavors to show that if the earth had been always in the form it now bears, it would not have been capable of a deluge, which could not have been effected without such an infinite mass of water as could neither be brought upon the earth nor afterwards any way removed from it. He also argues that the chaos, as a fluid body, would naturally and necessarily settle and cast itself into a smooth surface, everywhere equidistant from its center, and not into a surface broken into so many irregularities as our earth is, nor could it possibly imitate the cavities, dens, and broken holes within it. And these reasons he backs by the authority of scripture, which plainly intimates a difference between the form or constitution of the old world and of the present, by reason of which difference that was subject to perish by a deluge as this is subject to perish by a conflagration. Besides, there are several passages which seem to describe the structure of the antediluvian earth as founded and established on the waters and set as an orb over the face of the deep. Conformably to which, on the renovation or restitution of nature to its primeval state, the new earth will appear without a sea. To which he adds the testimony of ancient tradition that the world was oviform, which was true of that original earth, not only in respect to its outward figure but also to the inward composition of it: the central parts being represented by the yolk of the egg, the exterior region of the earth by the shell, and the abyss of water by the white that lies under the shell. The manner wherein he supposes this earth was supplied with water will be taken notice of when we come to consider more particularly the state of the antediluvian earth.

Several objections have been made to the philosophy of this gentleman’s hypothesis. For instance, his laws of gravitation ruin the whole contrivance because if everything subsided according to its specific gravity, the earth, being heavier than the water, must necessarily place itself nearer the center and so leave the waters to cover the face of the whole orb. Also, his fat or oily liquid to catch the terrene particles as they descended is but a weak expedient because it is impossible that oil or any other liquor should sustain such an immense, heavy orb. Furthermore, he has, without any reason, deprived the old world of the benefit and advantages of a sea, mountains, and minerals. But the great misfortune is that so coherent and surprising a scheme does not in several particulars accord with the letter of the scripture, with which he has in many places taken great liberty, supposing that the sacred books were not always to be so literally and naturally understood as was generally believed hitherto. For considering the mean capacities of the Jews, which were not capable of such points of philosophic truths; considering the most ancient ways of conveying (or rather concealing) sublime theorems by parables, fables, and hieroglyphics; considering the scripture style in some other cases, very different from the present plain way of discourse; considering the main end of those writings, the benefit of the moral world, seemed not to require a strict adherence to truth in every circumstance relating to the natural; and considering, lastly, that all ages had endeavored in vain to clear these points according to the strictness of the most obvious sense, and that the greater improvements in philosophy seemed only to render them still more unaccountable—all these considerations induced him to suppose that the holy writers only secured the fundamental and general verities, involving the rest under and explaining the whole by a way of speaking which was mystical and mythological, rather popular than true, and fitted more to the needs of men than the reality of things.

Mr. Whiston's Theory

The other theorist, Mr. Whiston, not only shows a greater regard to scripture and has avoided many difficulties that were chargeable on the former but also proceeds on more philosophical principles. He first lays down this proposition: that the Mosaic creation is not a nice and philosophical account of the origin of all things but a historical and true representation of the formation of our single earth out of a confused chaos and of the successive and visible changes thereof each day till it became the habitation of mankind. This he proves from the first words of Moses, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, which plainly imply that the creation of the universe out of nothing, which we usually style creation, was precedaneous to the six days’ work. The historian immediately descends thence to the chaos of our earth, to which he afterwards confines himself, mentioning indeed the making of the sun and other celestial bodies to accommodate his narrative to vulgar apprehension and make it complete, but chiefly to secure the Jews from the worship of the host of heaven. He therefore supposes that the sun, moon, and stars were created before and only made visible and conspicuous to the earth on the fourth day. He supposes that the ancient chaos, the origin of the earth, was the atmosphere of a comet, which is no other than a planet unformed or in its primeval state, placed in a very eccentric orbit. To support this proposition, he endeavors to show that the atmosphere of a comet has those several properties which are recorded of the ancient chaos, that it has such peculiar properties besides as lay a rational foundation for some of those phenomena of our earth which can scarce otherwise be philosophically explained, and that no other body or mass of bodies now known or ever heard of in the world can stand in competition or pretend to the same character.

He proceeds to suppose that the six days of the creation were equal to six years, a day and a year being one and the same thing before the fall of man, when the diurnal rotation of the earth about its axis, as he thinks, first began. This supposition agrees with the letter of Moses and the style of scripture elsewhere, wherein a day often denotes a year, and allows a convenient space for the works of creation, which appear to have been leisurely, regular, and gradual, without any precipitancy or acceleration by a miraculous hand on every occasion, not to mention other arguments drawn from the peculiar characters of the state of nature before the fall, which will be observed hereafter.

On these foundations, Mr. Whiston proceeds to account for the formation of the earth in this manner: That such formation was not a mere result from any necessary laws of mechanism independently on the divine power but the proper effect of the influence and interposition, and all along under the peculiar care of God, who not only created the matter of which the universe and particularly the earth was to consist out of a non-existent state and endued it with its several properties and powers, but interposed more particularly in the formation of the earth by changing the course and orbit of the chaos into that of a planet, by immediately forming the seeds of all animals and vegetables, by ordering every distinct day’s work to be completed in its proper period that every thing should follow in its own order and place, and principally in the creation of our first parents. That at the time immediately preceding the six days’ creation, the face of the abyss or superior regions of the chaos were involved in a thick darkness, agreeably to the nature of a comet, which is represented as containing a central, solid, hot body of many hundred or thousand miles in diameter, and besides that, a vastly large, fluid, heterogeneous mass or congeries of bodies in a very rare, separate, and expanded condition, whose diameter was ten or eleven times as long as that of the central solid, which is the atmosphere or chaos itself. But on the change of the comet’s orbit from a very eccentric to a moderately elliptical one, the commencing of the Mosaic creation, and the influence of the divine spirit, all things would begin to take their own places, and each species of bodies rank themselves according to the law of specific gravity. By which method, the mass of dense fluids which composed one part of the entire chaos, being heavier than the masses of earth and water and air, would sink downwards with the greatest velocity and elevate those masses enclosed among them upwards, which must distinguish the chaos into two very different and distinct regions. The lower and larger whereof would be a collection of dense and heavy fluids, or a vast abyss, immediately encompassing the central solid; the higher and lesser would be a collection of earthy, watery, and airy parts confusedly mixed and encompassing the said abyss. And this he takes to be the state of darkness, for the crowding together of all those opaque corpuscles which before roved about the immense regions of the atmosphere must by consequence exclude the rays of the sun much more than before.

Things being in this state, the visible part of the first day’s work was the production of light, or its successive appearance to all the parts of the earth, with the consequent distinction of darkness and light, night and day, upon the face of it. And this was effected by the separation of the upper and elementary chaos of earthy, watery, and airy corpuscles into two somewhat different regions: the one a solid orb of earth with considerable quantities of water in its pores; the other an atmosphere in a peculiar sense, or mass of the lightest earthy particles with the rest of the watery and airy particles, still somewhat confusedly mixed together. So that on this first day or year of the creation, the earthy or denser parts would take their places lowest on the surface of the great abyss, would settle in part into the same, and compose an orb of earth. And in its interstices and little cavities, all such watery particles as were already in this region or descended upon it before its consolidation would be enclosed, and that as far above the surface of the abyss as their quantity would enable them to reach. On this first day also, the upper regions of the chaos, now in some measure freed from those earthy and opaque masses which before excluded the same and caused the above-mentioned thick darkness, would in some degree admit the rays of the sun. Now therefore that glorious emanation, light, would begin to appear on the face of the earth, and by the annual motion, successively illuminate the several parts of it and consequently occasion the vicissitude of night and day.

The visible part of the second day’s work was the elevation of the air with all its contained vapors, the spreading of it for an expanse above the earth, and the distinction thence arising of superior and inferior waters. The former consisted of those vapors raised and sustained by the air; the latter of such as either were enclosed in the pores, interstices, and bowels of the earth or lay upon the surface thereof. The heat of the sun at the conclusion of the former day beginning considerably to penetrate the superior regions of the chaos, and the lower earthy strata continuing to settle somewhat closer together, the watery parts would subside and, where they could get entrance, saturate their inward pores and vacuities, and the atmosphere would free itself more and more from the heaviest and most opaque corpuscles and thereby become much more tenuous and clear than before. Whereupon, by the time the night or first part of this second day was over and the sun arose, the light and heat of that luminary would more freely and deeply penetrate the atmosphere and become very sensible in these upper or airy regions. Consequently, vast quantities of vapors would be elevated and sustained there and so increase the quantities which were there already. Meanwhile, all the earthy corpuscles uncapable of rarefaction, and with them all such watery particles as were so near the earth that the sun’s power could not sufficiently reach them, were still sinking downwards. The former were increasing the thickness and bulk of the solid earth, and the latter, if the earth was too solid to admit them (as by this time it would probably be), were flowing down apace and covering all its surface with water. So that the expanse or firmament which was this day spread out above the earth was plainly the air. The superior waters were all those fresh ones which, in the form of vapor, a nine or ten months’ heat of the sun with the assistance of the central heat could elevate and the air sustain, besides those vast quantities of salt ones which had never yet left those regions. The inferior waters were those which were not elevated but remained below in the bowels or on the surface of the earth.

The visible parts of the third day’s work were two: the former, the collection of the inferior waters (of such as were now under the heaven) into the seas, with the consequent appearance of the dry land; the latter, the production of vegetables out of that ground so lately become dry. In order to apprehend which, it must be considered that the orb of the earth had been settling and fixing itself on the surface of the abyss from the very beginning of the creation and was, by the cohesion of its parts, grown solid some time before all the lighter and remoter earthy parts were descended upon it—suppose by the end of the first day. By which means, and by reason of the different density and specific gravity of its columns, it was settled into the abyss in different degrees and thereby became of an unequal surface, distinguished into mountains, plains, and valleys. These things being supposed, at the conclusion of the preceding day, the air being crowded with vapors to a prodigious degree, in the night or former part of this third day, the said vapors must needs descend on the earth in vast quantities, leaving the air by degrees pretty free and becoming of celestial, terrestrial waters. These waters being descended, by reason of the inequality of the earth’s surface and its solidity, must in some time have run down from the higher parts by the declivities and hollows into the lowest valleys and most depressed regions of all, and there composed the seas and lakes. So that in the morning, the entire face of the globe, which was before covered with the descending waters, must be distinguished into overflowed valleys and extant continents. The dry land being now distinguished from the seas and just become moist and juicy like the primitive slime, on the sun rising, it was of all other the most fit season for the germination of the seeds of vegetables and the growth of trees, herbs, and plants, for which purpose nine or ten months’ continual presence of the sun was a time very proper and natural.

The fourth day’s work was the placing of the heavenly bodies—sun, moon, and stars—in the expanse or firmament, that is, the rendering of them visible and conspicuous on the face of the earth, together with their several assignments to their respective offices there. For though the light of the sun penetrated the atmosphere in some measure on the first day and in the succeeding ones had very considerable influence upon it, yet it is by no means to be supposed that his body was visible all that while. The air, even at this day, is not at all times so clear as to render it discernible by us, though we are at the same time sufficiently sensible of his force and influence in the constant productions of nature. But on the coming on of this fourth day, and the sun’s abode below the horizon for two or three months, those vapors which were raised the day before must fall downwards and so, before the approach of the morning, leave the air in the greatest clearness and purity imaginable and permit the moon first, and then the sun, most plainly to appear and be conspicuous to the earth. This fourth day therefore is the time when both these heavenly bodies, though in being before, yet so as to be wholly strangers to a spectator on earth, were rendered visible. The whole inanimate world, with its vegetable productions, was now complete, according to the tradition of the Chinese inhabiting Formosa and other islands, who hold that the world, when first created, was without form or shape, but by one of their deities was brought to its full perfection in four years.

The production of the fish and fowl out of the waters, with the benediction bestowed on them in order to their propagation, was the work of the fifth day, which was a very proper time for their introduction. The terraqueous globe being now become habitable both to the swimming and volatile animals, and the air clear and so penetrable by that complete heat of the sun which was requisite to the generation of such creatures, those seeds or little bodies of fish and fowl which were contained in the water (or moist fruitful slime of kin to it) were now exposed to the kindly warmth of the sun and the constant supply of a most gentle and equal heat from beneath. They were neither disturbed by any sudden alteration of the air from winds nor by the agitations of tides, which in those small seas and in the absence of the diurnal rotation were imperceptible and gradual. These seeds, being invigorated, became now prolific, and a numerous offspring of the swimming and volatile tribes arose, whereby the two fluid elements, air and water, became replenished with these first pairs, which were enabled to propagate their species.

The sixth day’s work was the production of all the terrestrial or dry-land animals. The brute beasts were produced out of the earth, after which the body of Adam was formed of the dust of the ground, and by the breath of life breathed into him in a peculiar manner, he became a living soul. And some time after on the same day, he was cast into a deep sleep, and Eve was formed of a rib taken from his side. The earth being now grown more solid and dry, and the air fully clear and fit for respiration, and the other dispositions of external nature being subservient, it was a proper season for the generation of the land animals and the introduction of the noblest of them, man.

This is the substance of the latter theory, wherein, among many ingenious and probable solutions, there are some suppositions which have been thought too bold and precarious. It has been objected that he is probably mistaken as to the extent of the Mosaic creation, it being pretty certain that the moon was formed at that time, or at least placed in its orbit and made to turn round the earth, for no comets have any secondary planets. So that something more must be intended by Moses than the bare rendering the moon visible, and the word "made," being equally applied both to sun and moon, it is supposed it ought in both places to be taken in the same, that is, a literal sense. The atmosphere of a comet could not, it has been thought, have been the primitive chaos, being not an obscure but a bright, pellucid fluid, which is a consequence of the intense heat of the central solid, and because the greatest part of the bodies which compose the upper stratum of the earth would have been vitrified on the comet's near approach to the sun and so very improper for the formation of the earth. That the diurnal rotation of the earth did not commence till after the fall, so that till that time days and years were exactly the same, has been held a paradox, considering the prodigious cold that must be occasioned by the total absence of the sun for one half of the year, and the intense heat that must ensue upon its continual shining upon it for the other. These immoderate degrees of heat and cold must be pernicious to the antediluvian plants and animals unless their bodies were of a very different constitution from what they are now. Nor can there be any necessity to lengthen a day into a year for the sake of a gradual and regular formation of things, without precipitance or acceleration, where an Almighty Agent is acknowledged to be concerned.

It may not therefore be amiss, laying all hypotheses aside, to briefly propose such an explication of the cosmogony as may be most agreeable both to reason and the letter of scripture.

And first, it is conceived that the Mosaic creation is neither to be extended to the whole universe nor yet confined to the terrestrial globe alone. The middle opinion, that it included the solar system and that only, seems the most probable from the near similitude and relation the several planets in that system bear to one another and their having the same common center and luminary. So that though the historian chiefly regards the earth in his whole narration, yet there is reason to presume that the other planets were formed in the same manner and in the same time as the earth, of so many particular chaotic masses.

Moses, after the general assertion that both heaven and earth were originally made by God and before he begins his account of their reduction into the present system, informs us that the earth in particular was at first in an unformed and desert state. When, as a thing preparatory to the work, the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, by which spirit some understand the third person in the blessed Trinity, others that plastic nature which was subservient to him on this occasion, or some other emanation of the divine power. It is reasonable to suppose this spirit moved the chaotic mass, whose surface was covered with water or other fluid matter, and impregnated it with several kinds of vital influence, preparing every part to receive the intended disposition, order, and life.

Things being in this state, the confused, stagnating parts of matter began to range themselves in order. The grosser parts subsiding, the lighter and more tenuous mounted up, by which means the atmosphere being in some degree cleared, the luminous rays of the sun began to pierce it and caused an imperfect and glimmering light, yet sufficient partly to dispel the before-total darkness and to distinguish day from night. And this account of the light which appeared on the first day is much more reasonable than to suppose the substance of the sun, much less the fixed stars, were then extracted from the chaos, because more than ninety-nine parts in a hundred of the matter of the universe are fiery corpuscles, and if they were included at first in the chaos, it could not possibly have been dark or caliginous. Nor is it probable that even the terrene matter of the planets was taken from the Mosaic chaos, not only because it is expressly called the earth, but because such an imagination is directly overthrown by the now-undoubted property of the universal gravitation of matter, not to mention the false supposition which must in that case be made of the earth’s being the center of the world. To account for this day’s light before the sun is said to be made, there is no occasion to recur to the supposition of its being either the divine Shechinah or no more than a temporary light occasioned by the rapid motion communicated by God to a portion of matter.

The second day, the expanse or air, called by Moses heaven, was perfected, being now freed from the gross terrene particles which before crowded it and made capable of supporting clouds and aqueous vapors, which were the superior waters, as those on the earth were the inferior. By the waters above the firmament cannot be understood the planetary waters for the reasons given above, and the notion the old Christian fathers had of super-celestial waters is perfectly groundless.

The former part of the third day’s work was to gather the waters, which before covered the face of the earth, into seas and lakes, that the dry land might appear. How this was effected is not easy to determine. That God himself should raise the mountains and hollow the channels of the sea for this purpose appears not a little indecent. For which reason, some have supposed the mountains might have been thrown up by the force of a subterranean fire or flatus in the same manner as earthquakes are now caused. But the more philosophical opinion is that they were occasioned by the different densities of the several columns of the earth when its surface was first formed, some sinking lower into the abyss than others, for it is more than probable that the mountainous columns are much hollower and lighter than the other, notwithstanding the vulgar opinion to the contrary. The latter part of this day’s work was the production of vegetables, which were designed as food for the future animals. But however great we suppose the fecundity of the primigenial earth to be, it is scarce to be imagined that trees and plants could arrive at full growth and bear their several fruits and seeds in so short a space as a day without the assistance of a supernatural power. And as God is on all hands allowed to have formed the seeds of those vegetables, it may not perhaps be wrong to attribute their sudden maturation also to his interposition, though it is well known how much vegetation may be helped and forwarded by art, even at this day, of which there have been some surprising instances, and much more might be expected from nature in that vigorous state.

On the fourth day, the two great lights, the sun and the moon, are said to have been made and placed in the heaven. It must not, however, be supposed they were then first created or assigned to their respective orbs. For the sun was not only in being from the beginning of the Mosaic creation but had all along great influence on the earth, its light and heat gradually increasing and influencing the earth and its productions with greater power as the air became from time to time more and more pure and desiccated. And the moon, as well as the other planets, kept pace with the earth in its formation. But only that the bodies of those luminaries, which had been hid from the earth till the fourth day when the air was perfectly freed from the heterogeneous particles and the vapors which before obscured it, did then first appear to the earth and visibly begin to perform their several offices. The stars also are for the same reason said to be made on that day, though the planets, as we have said, were forming before, and the fixed stars were no part of this creation.

After the formation of the inanimate world, Moses proceeds to the formation of animals, and he begins with fishes and fowls, which were both produced on the fifth day out of the waters in great numbers. And as the original of fish and volatiles was from the same element, so there is supposed to be some congruity in their nature, being both oviparous, and their motions of swimming and flying something alike. In the former part of the sixth and last day, the terrestrial animals were produced out of the earth.

On the Formation of Plants and Animals

The manner of the original formation of plants and animals, in which the wisdom of the creator principally appears, has never been accounted for by any philosopher with any tolerable success. Matter and the laws of motion have nothing at all to do in these things, whatever they have in the inanimate part of the world. How ridiculous and groundless those hypotheses are which make them to be produced from the earth, supposed ever so fruitful, by the influence and heat of the sun, appears from the late discovery made in philosophy that there is no such thing as equivocal generation of any the meanest animal or plant. The sun and earth and water and all the powers of nature in conjunction are able to do nothing at all towards the producing of anything endued with so much as even a vegetative life. It must be therefore necessarily allowed that God himself, or some agent empowered by him, actually formed both plants and animals, making use of the earth and water as the matter only whereof he constituted their parts.

But whether these first vegetative and sensitive creatures were created in their seeds only (which contain the plants and animals themselves in little) and dispersed over the superficial part of the land and water, which had power given them to hatch and bring them forth, or whether they were created in their full state of perfection, seems not easy to decide. It has been thought by some modern philosophers that God at first created only two of each species of animals, from which all the rest proceeded by generation. To support which opinion, they observe that there was but one man and one woman created, and at the deluge but two of each kind (of unclean beasts) were preserved in the ark. But it seems more consonant to scripture that a great number of every kind were formed at first. We are assured the aquatic creatures and fowls were brought forth abundantly, and plants, having no locomotive power, must necessarily have been created dispersedly all the world over.

There has been also a further question moved concerning the creation of animals, namely, whether all animals that already have been or hereafter shall be were at first actually created by God, or whether he has given to each kind of animal such a power of generation as to prepare matter and produce new individuals in their own bodies? It seems to be the most reasonable opinion that God did himself at first actually create all the individual animals that ever were or ever shall be, and that there is no such thing as any production of new ones. For what were that but a creation of such individuals? And what did God at the first creation more than, if this be true, we see every day done, that is, produce a new animal out of matter which it itself prepares? All the difference is that God does that in an instant which the creature must take time to do. Besides, the parent animal cannot be the agent or efficient in the generation or forming and nourishing of the fetus because that is a work of art and reason which brute creatures are not endued with, nor indeed does man himself understand anything of the process of generation in himself. Again, it is most probable, if not certain, that most animals have in them from the beginning the seeds or eggs of all the young they shall afterwards bring forth, which when spent and exhausted, the creature becomes barren. The females of all viviparous quadrupeds are brought forth with their fetuses or ovaria, and all birds are formed with their ovary or egg-cluster containing the seeds of all the eggs they shall ever lay. Now had the creature a power of producing new ones, what need was there that there should be so many at first formed in them? Whereupon these philosophers argue thus: Let us suppose God did at first create two animals, a male and a female. The female must be created with its ovaries, which (as we have said) contain so many seeds or eggs as the creature should ever bring forth young. So it is clear that not only the first pair but the first generation of animals were actually created. Again, this generation from their first appearance had each of them (that is, the females) its ovaria containing in like manner the seeds of its future offspring, so that this second generation was also created in the first. The same may be demonstrated of the third and fourth, and so on of all the generations that shall be as long as the world shall last.

The Creation of Man

When the creation had proceeded thus far, and every thing that could be subservient to man or advance his felicity was completed, he who was to be the lord of all, and for whose sake the whole was framed, was brought into the world, being created in a solemn and immediate manner by God himself, after a consultation, as it were, of the holy Trinity. Every Person wherein may justly be presumed to have been peculiarly concerned in the production of that being which was to bear the image of God and be made capable, in some degree, of his immortality.

Man then was by a divine power created on the sixth day, after the terrestrial animals had been produced. His body was formed out of the dust of the ground, whence he had the name of Adam, and his soul was immediately infused into him by his creator. In which better and immortal part more evidently consisted that image or resemblance of God wherein he is said to have been made. The woman was formed also on the same day, out of the side of the man, who had been cast into a deep sleep for that end. And this original, it is to be supposed, was chosen to conciliate the stricter love and union between them. The side was also the most proper part to denote that equality with the man for which the woman was designed, whereas if she had been taken from the head, it might have argued some intended superiority, or if from the lower parts, the contrary. From what Adam said on his first sight of the woman, that she was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, it appears he well knew whence she was formed, whether he was sensible of the past operation or had it otherwise revealed to him, as probably it was in a vision as he slept. Besides Eve, it is pretended by some Rabbins that God made another woman out of the earth named Lilith, of whom the Jews relate many stories.

That the first pair were created in an adult and perfect state, immediately capable of the full exercise of their natural powers and faculties, is not to be doubted. Nor is it to be imagined but that they both came out of their maker’s hands in the greatest perfection both of body and mind. But we must not hence entertain those extravagant opinions which some have held in those respects. The Talmudists say that Adam reached from one end of the earth to the other when first created, but that when he had sinned, God squeezed his stature to a hundred ells. Though others suppose this was done at the request of the angels, who were terrified at his gigantic size, and that God still left him nine hundred cubits high. And that was not a great deal too much if he waded through the sea into our continent after his expulsion from paradise, which, as some imagine, was separated from this world by the ocean. The Mohammedans also have a tradition from their prophet that Adam was as high as a tall palm tree. But this would be too much in proportion if that were really the print of his foot which is pretended to be such, being somewhat above two spans long, on the top of a mountain in the island of Ceylon (thence named Pico de Adam), and too little if Eve were of so enormous a size as is said, that when her head lay on one hill near Mecca, her knees rested on two others in the plain about two musket-shots asunder.

The beauty of Eve is said to have been so extraordinary that the prince of the angels fell in love with her, which occasioned his fall. And to give as charming an idea of Adam’s person, some have imagined that God at his creation clothed himself with a human body superlatively beautiful and by that model formed the body of Adam, which apparition was the first prelude of the incarnation. And what is yet more wonderful, Adam all the while looked on and saw his maker in that lovely form, fashioning every limb. Nor have the gifts of his mind been less magnified than his stature and beauty. Some Rabbins have been contented to equal him with Moses and Solomon; others assert that he was master of every science and art, that he knew more the first day of his creation than any other by the experience of a long life, nay, that he surpassed the angels themselves in knowledge, allegorically interpreting what is said of his stature reaching from one end of the world to the other as referring to the extent of his understanding.

But it is still more groundless and extravagant to suppose, as several Rabbins have done, that Adam’s body was created double, male on one side and female on the other, being joined together by the shoulders, the heads looking directly contrary ways, and that God, when he had made Eve, had no more to do than to split this body in two. Others join them by their sides and say the male body was on the right, which embraced the other round the neck with his left hand, while the other did the same to him with her right. These dreams are sufficiently refuted by the text of Moses. It may not, however, be improper to add a word of the Hermaphrodites or Androgynes of which Plato has said so much. They were bodies which had the two sexes, with four arms, four legs, and two faces on one neck, turned one towards the other. This duplicity of numbers gave them a prodigious strength and consequently inspired them with great insolence, and they thought of no less than making war against the gods. Who consulting on means to bring them to reason, the advice of Jupiter was approved, and that was to split them in two. Which being done, each part still preserved a strong inclination to unite itself to the other, and this was, according to him, the original of love.

The Mohammedans have several peculiar traditions about the creation of Adam. They say that the angels Gabriel, Michael, and Israfel were sent by God, one after another, to fetch for that purpose seven handfuls of earth from different depths and of different colors (whence some account for the various complexions of mankind). But the earth, being apprehensive of the consequence and desiring them to represent her fear to God that the creature he designed to form would rebel against him and draw down his curse upon her, they returned without performing God’s command. Whereupon he sent Azrael on the same errand, who executed his commission without remorse, for which reason God appointed him to separate the souls from the bodies, being therefore called the angel of death. The earth he had taken was carried into Arabia to a place now between Mecca and Tayef, where, being first kneaded by the angels, it was afterwards formed by God himself into a human form and left to dry for the space of forty days, or as others say, as many years. The angels, in the interim, often visited it, and Iblis (afterwards the devil) among the rest. But he, not contented with looking on it, kicked it with his foot till it rung, and knowing God designed that creature to be his superior, took a secret resolution never to acknowledge him as such. After this, God animated the figure of clay and endued it with an intelligent soul, and when he had placed him in paradise, formed Eve out of his left side.

The two first human pair, according to the Phoenician tradition, were begotten or generated by the wind Colpias and his wife Baau, which is interpreted night. That is, by a hollow wind acting on unformed matter. The meaning is no more than this, that a wind enclosed in several cavities of unshapen matter worked out of it the first man, the rude matter being the passive principle or cause and therefore here figuratively called the wife, and the enclosed wind being the active principle and therefore here intimated to be as it were the husband in this first generation.

On the Human Soul

That the soul of man is a spiritual substance, independent on the matter it informs, is evident to any who considers the power and freedom of its operations, which no accident can be supposed to have, and which matter, with all its refinements and maturations, can never be able to perform. It has however been questioned whether the souls of men are infused into them immediately from God or whether they are derived ex traduce from their parents. The latter opinion has been maintained from all other creatures having the power of propagating their species in full perfection, by which it seems to follow that mankind were endued with the same; from the likeness of temper and disposition of mind which children often take from their parents; and from the indecency of conceiving God to be incessantly making souls whenever the sexes are stimulated to satisfy their natural appetite. But it is scarce possible to maintain the immateriality and immortality of the human soul on this supposition. For if the soul is propagated by generation, it must, to our best apprehension, be material and liable to corruption. It is therefore more reasonable to believe that though God has committed the formation of our bodies to the agency of second causes, yet he has reserved the production of our souls to himself, who is the Father and God of the spirits of all flesh.

It has also been doubted whether the souls of mankind were all created at once, together with that of Adam, in order to be united to certain bodies which should be prepared afterwards for their reception, or whether they are successively created as the bodies they are to inform are made fit to receive them. Such of the old philosophers who believed the soul to be a distinct substance from the body, as Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato, concluded that all souls must pre-exist in the universe before generation and transmigration into their respective bodies. And this doctrine was not confined to human souls only but extended universally to all souls and lives whatsoever. For the ancients were so far from denying the sense and consciousness of brutes that the generality of them allowed them the faculty of reasoning, though they were not able to express their thoughts as man did. For which reason, they were supposed by some to transmigrate indifferently from men into other animals and from animals into men, it being only the difference of the organs and the modification of the matter to which they were united wherein consisted the seeming disparity of their powers. Several of the ancient Christians have also believed the pre-existence of souls, induced by this consideration that it was incongruous to bring God upon the stage perpetually and make him immediately interpose everywhere in the generation of men by the miraculous production of their souls out of nothing. Nay, the continual creation and decreation of the souls of brutes has been thought so improbable that it has been fancied they are but so many particular eradiations or effluxes from that source of life above, which animate such matter as is fitly prepared to receive and be actuated by them, so long as it continues such. But when those organized bodies, by reason of their indisposition, become incapable of being further acted upon, are resumed and retracted into that original head or fountain, it seeming not at all absurd to grant perpetuity of duration to the souls even of brutes, any more than to every the least particle of matter.

Nor is this doctrine of pre-existence unknown to the Mohammedans, who imagine that God drew out of the loins of Adam all his posterity at once and made a covenant with them that they should acknowledge him for their lord. They say that all these men were actually assembled together in a valley near Mecca or, as others say, in the plain of Dahia in India, in the shape of pismites which are endued with understanding, and after they had in the presence of the angels as witnesses confessed their dependence on God, they were again caused to return into the loins of their great ancestor. That the Jews had likewise some notion of the soul’s existing before the body appears from their question put to our Savior, whether the man that was born blind had himself sinned or his parents to deserve that punishment. And as this opinion was not then contradicted, some have supposed it to have been thereby tacitly approved.

Notwithstanding which, the vulgar opinion of the successive creation of souls may with good reason be allowed. For why should we imagine that God put forth all his creative vigor at once in a moment, ever afterwards remaining a spectator only of the consequent result and permitting nature alone to do all without any farther interposition? And how is it possible that if our souls were ever in such a state of pre-existence, we should have so perfectly lost all memory and consciousness of anything?

Before we have done with this subject, the creation of man, we must take some notice of the opinion of those who think mankind were in being before Adam, who was the progenitor of the Jews only. To support which, they allege that Moses makes mention of two distinct creations, one of mankind in general and the other of Adam and Eve. And in the progress of his history gives strong intimations that there were several more men in the world when they were created. Else it is not easily to be conceived how Cain could be a tiller of the ground, which must presuppose all the artificers that have relation to tillage, or what reason he had to apprehend that every one that found him would slay him. Nor can his going into another country, marrying a wife, and building a city be otherwise accounted for. From which they would infer that Moses intended only to give an account of the origin of the Jews and not of the primitive parents of the whole human race. These objections are easily answered, for the passage wherein the creation of man is mentioned the second time is plainly no more than a recapitulation of what had been said before of the creation of the world in general, with a more particular detail of that of our first parents. And as to the numbers of men supposed to be in the world about the time of the murder of Abel, it is by no means improbable that these should be the descendants of Adam and Eve, whose posterity in the space of near one hundred and thirty years (for it was in that year of Adam’s age that Seth, who was given in lieu of Abel, was born) might, by a fair calculation, be multiplied to many thousand souls, considering the primitive fecundity and that none are supposed to have died in the interim.

But the most plausible objection of the pre-Adamites is that if Adam and Eve are allowed to be the progenitors of all mankind, there can be no tolerable cause assigned for the difference in color between the whites and the blacks, it being very improbable they were both the offspring of the same parents. To this it may be answered that the variety of complexions in the world may be rationally accounted for another way. We know how the hair and color of men’s bodies differ according to the climate they inhabit and their greater or lesser distance from the sun. We may therefore well conclude that the first colony which settled in a very hot country received a great change in their complexion, proportionable to the heat of the climate, and became very tawny, gradually inclining to blackness as the sun was more intense upon them. Hence, in a generation or two, that high degree of tawniness might become natural and at length the pride of the natives. The men might begin to value themselves upon this complexion, and the women to affect them the better for it, so that their love for their husbands and daily conversation with them might have a considerable influence upon the fruit of their wombs and make each child grow blacker and blacker according to the fancy and imagination of the mother, the force of which is evident from many instances. Upon this supposition, the children thus produced must every birth approach nearer to an absolute blackness, and as their tender bodies came to be exposed naked (as the manner of such countries is) to the violent heat of the sun, their skin must needs be scorched in an extraordinary manner and perhaps its very texture altered, and by that means contract a blackness far superior to that of their parents. By such degrees, it is not improbable that people of the fairest complexion, when removed into a very hot climate, may in a few generations become perfect negroes. As to what some have imagined, that this blackness was at first supernatural and a judgment inflicted upon Ham, the son of Noah, for discovering his father’s nakedness, and that all people of that complexion are the progeny of that undutiful son, this seems very unlikely and without foundation. The curse on that occasion was laid on Canaan, the son of Ham, by name, and yet his posterity are allowed not to have been black.

Thus have we attended the earth through its several degrees of formation, seen it perfected, clothed with trees and plants, and replenished with animals, and at last man, for whom the whole was designed and to whom the dominion of it was expressly given by its maker, was introduced and placed in it.

Whether all this was really done in the space of six days has been a question. Some, as has been observed, think it much too short for such a work, and others too long, supposing that the world was created in a moment and that Moses extends it to six days to better help the imagination of the people, that things may seem to rise in some order and method and to take off any image of haste or precipitancy. But we cannot see any reason to depart from the letter of Moses in this particular, the creation described by him being not the creation of the substance of all things out of nothing, which was most probably the effect of one individual act, but the formation of one world or system only out of matter before created.

It has been disputed also in what season of the year the world was made, which, it is to be presumed, must be meant in respect of the place where Adam was created, for otherwise all these seasons must have been in being at once in different parts of the world. Some have supposed the vernal equinox to have been the time, but others the autumnal, which opinion is the more generally received and seems to be confirmed from the years anciently beginning from that time. This indeed was afterwards altered by Moses, who ordered the ecclesiastical year should commence from the vernal equinox or the month Nisan, but the Jews in civil affairs still continued to compute from the former, or the month Tishri.

Another subject of enquiry has been the place where Adam was created. There is an ancient tradition that it was in Syria, near where Damascus now stands. Others will have it to have been in Armenia. But it was most probably in or near the garden of Eden, the seat designed for him, wherever that was.

The Mohammedans, who have very right notions as to the creation of the world in six days, do however believe that God, previous to that creation, made the table whereon, as they suppose, his decrees are written; the pen wherewith they are written; the waters whereon his throne is established; and the throne itself. Wherein they have imitated the Jews, who say that God created seven things before the world: paradise, the law, the souls of just men, Israel, the throne of God’s glory, Jerusalem, and the Messiah.

On the Creation of Angels

Before we quit this subject, it may be expected we should say something of the creation of angels, who so eminently concerned themselves in the affairs of mankind, at least in the first ages of the world.

Angels, in the proper signification of the word, do not import the nature of any being but only the office to which they are appointed, especially by way of message or intercourse between God and his creatures. In which sense, they are called the ministers of God who do his pleasure, and ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation. That there are such beings as we call angels—that is, certain permanent substances, invisible and imperceptible to our senses, endued with understanding and power superior to that of human nature, created by God and subject to him as the supreme Being, ministering to his divine providence in the government of the world by his appointment, and more especially attending the affairs of mankind—is a truth so fully attested by scripture that it cannot be doubted and was so generally acknowledged by the Jews that it is scarce to be believed that even the Sadducees themselves utterly denied their existence, but only that they had no notion of their appearing in those latter times, as many Christians, though they do not absolutely impugn the being of spirits, yet are far from giving credit to the frequent stories of apparitions. Nay, the existence of such invisible beings was generally acknowledged by the ancient heathens, though under different appellations, the Greeks calling them demons and the Romans genii or lares. Epicurus seems to have been the only one among the old philosophers who absolutely rejected them. And indeed, the belief of middle intelligences influencing the affairs of the world and serving as ministers or interpreters between God and man is as extensive as the belief of a God, having never, as we know, been called in question by those who had any religion at all. If we had no such revelation and tradition, it seems very reasonable to suppose there are intermediate beings to fill up the gap which would otherwise be in nature. For as there is a gradation of creatures on earth—some having barely being, as earth, air, and water; some that besides being have life, as vegetables; some that besides life have sense and perception, as brute animals; and some that besides sense have reason and cogitation, as men—and as we see our sensitive part exists in beings beneath us, so it is very probable that our more noble and intellectual part exists in beings as much superior to us as we are to brutes, and that there is a like gradual ascent from the lowest rank of them, which borders upon man, to the highest, which comes as near as a finite creature can to an infinite deity.

That the angels were in being long before the Mosaic creation is generally allowed and indeed cannot be doubted, since they were actually present, if not employed in that creation, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. And since it is more than probable that the fall of the apostate angels was some time at least before it.

As to the natures of these beings, we are told that they are spirits, but whether pure spirits divested of all matter or united to some thin bodies or corporeal vehicles has been a controversy of long standing. Not only the ancient philosophers but some of the Christian fathers were of opinion that angels were clothed with ethereal or fiery bodies of the same nature with those which we shall one day have when we come to be equal to them. But the more current opinion, especially of later times, has been that they are substances entirely spiritual, though they can at any time assume bodies and appear in human or other shapes.

That the angelical powers and abilities vastly excel those of man cannot be denied if we consider that their faculties are not clogged or impeded, as ours are, by any of those imperfections which are inseparable from corporeal beings. So that their understandings are always in perfect vigor, their inclinations regular, their motions strong and quick, their actions irresistible by material bodies, whose natural qualities they can control or manage to their purposes and occasion either blessings or calamities, public or private, here below. Instances of which are too numerous to mention.

Besides their attendance on God and their waiting and executing of his commands, they are also presumed to be employed in taking care of mankind and their concerns. And that every man had such a tutelar or guardian angel, even from his birth, was a firm belief and tradition among the Jews, and our Savior himself seems to have been of the same sentiment. The heathens were also of the same persuasion and thought it a crime to neglect the admonitions of so divine a guide. Socrates publicly confessed himself to be under the direction of such an angel or demon, as several others have since done. And on this tutelar genius of each person, they believed his happiness and fortune depended. Every genius did his best for the interest of his client, and if a man came by the worst, it was a sign the strength of his genius was inferior to that of his opponent, that is, of an inferior order, and this was governed by chance. There were some genii whose ascendant was so great over others that their very presence entirely disconcerted them, which was the case of that of Augustus in respect to that of M. Antony. And for the same reason, perhaps, some persons have wit and speak well when others are absent, in whose presence they are confounded and out of countenance. The Romans thought the tutelar genii of those who attained the empire to be of an eminent order, on which account they had great honors shown them. Nations and cities also had their several genii. The ancient Persians so firmly believed the ministry of angels and their superintendence over human affairs that they gave their names to their months and the days of their month and assigned them distinct offices and provinces. And it is from them the Jews confess to have received the names of the months and angels which they brought with them when they returned from the Babylonian captivity. After which, we find they also assigned charges to the angels and in particular the patronage of empires and nations, Michael being the prince of the Jews, as Raphael is supposed to have been of the Persians.

The Mohammedans have so great a respect for the angels that they account a man an infidel who either denies their existence or loves them not. They believe them to be free from sin, enjoying the presence of God, to whom they are never disobedient. That they have subtle, pure bodies, being created of light, and have no distinction of sexes, nor do they need the refreshment of food or sleep. They suppose them to have different forms and offices: that some adore God in several postures, others sing his praises and intercede for men, some carry and encompass his throne, others write the actions of men and are assigned guardians to them.

As the numbers of these celestial spirits are very great, it is likewise reasonable to believe that there are several orders and degrees among them, which is also confirmed by scripture. Whence some speculative men have distributed them into nine orders according to the different names by which they are there called, and reduced those orders into three hierarchies, as they call them. To the first of which belong seraphim, cherubim, and thrones; to the second, dominions, virtues, and powers; and to the third, principalities, archangels, and angels. They imagine farther that there are some who constantly reside in heaven, others who are ministers and sent forth as there is occasion to execute the orders they receive from God by the former. The Jews reckon but four orders or companies of angels, each headed by an archangel: the first order being that of Michael, the second of Gabriel, the third of Uriel, and the fourth of Raphael. But though the Jews believe them to be but four, yet it seems there were rather seven. The Persians also held there were subordinate degrees among the angels.

On the Fallen Angels

Although the angels were originally created perfect, good, and obedient to their master’s will, yet some of them sinned and kept not their first estate but left their habitation, and so, of the most blessed and glorious, became the most vile and miserable of all God’s creatures. They were expelled the regions of light and cast down to hell to be reserved in everlasting chains under darkness until the day of judgment. With heaven, they lost their heavenly disposition, which delighted once in doing good and praising God, and fell into a settled rancor against him and malice against men. Their inward peace was gone, all desire of doing good departed from them, and instead thereof, revengeful thoughts and despair took possession of them and created an eternal hell within them.

When and for what offense these apostate spirits fell from heaven and plunged themselves into such an abyss of wickedness and woe are questions very hard, if not impossible, to be determined by any clear evidence of scripture. As to the time, it is most reasonable to believe that their fall preceded the creation of the world, though some have imagined it to have been after, and that carnality or lusting to converse with women upon earth was the sin which ruined them—an opinion built on a mistaken interpretation of scripture, as if angels were meant by the sons of God who are said to have begotten the mighty men of old on the daughters of men. Others have supposed that the angels, being informed of God’s intention to create man after his own image and to dignify his nature by Christ’s assuming of it, and thinking their glory to be eclipsed thereby, envied man’s happiness and so revolted. And with this opinion, that of the Mohammedans has some affinity, who are taught that the devil, who was once one of those angels who are nearest to God’s presence and named Azazil, forfeited paradise for refusing to worship or pay homage to Adam at the command of God. But on what occasion soever it first showed itself, pride seems to have been the leading sin of the angels, who, admiring and valuing themselves too much on the excellence of their nature and the height of their station, came at length to entertain so little respect for their creator as to be guilty of downright rebellion and apostasy.

It is certain from scripture that these fallen angels were in great numbers and that there was also some order and subordination preserved among them, one especially being considered as their prince and called by several names: Beelzebub, Satan, or Samael by the Jews; Ahriman by the Persians; and Iblis by the Mohammedans. Their constant employment is not only doing evil themselves but endeavoring by all arts and means to seduce and pervert mankind by tempting them to all kinds of sin and thereby bringing them into the same desperate state with themselves.

Besides the angels and devils, the Mohammedans believe there are a sort of intermediate creatures which they call Jinn or Genii, of a grosser fabric than angels. Some of whom are good and others bad, and capable of future salvation or damnation as men are. The Orientals pretend that these Genii inhabited the world for many thousand years before the creation of Adam, under the reigns of several princes who all bore the common name of Solomon. But falling at length into an almost general corruption, Iblis was sent to drive them into a remote part of the earth, there to be confined. That some of that generation still remaining were by Tahmurath, one of the ancient kings of Persia who waged war against them, forced to retreat into the famous mountains of Qaf. Of which successions and wars they have many fabulous and romantic stories. They also make different ranks and degrees among this kind of beings (if they are not rather of different species), some being called absolutely Jinn, some Peri or fairies, some Div or giants, and others Tacwins or fates.

As to the ancient Greeks and Romans, we do not find they had any notion of evil spirits or devils in the usual sense of the word, if we except only Plutarch’s evil principle before mentioned. Their infernal gods were not conceived to be of an evil nature, and though they believed the furies were the tormentors of wicked men in another life, yet they looked on them as goddesses and the avengers only of evil actions.

Much more might be added to what we have already said on these subjects, but as we may be thought already to have exceeded the bounds of an introduction, we shall here conclude it and hasten to the history itself.